STATISTICAL MANAGEMENT OF FUZZY ELEMENTS IN RANDOM EXPERIMENTS .1. A DISCUSSION ON TREATING FUZZINESS AS A KIND OF RANDOMNESS

This paper presents an interpretation of grades of membership as probabilities in statistical problems. Thus, after examining some different sources of fuzzy imprecision in random experiments, we will conclude that the interpretation above could make only some sense when fuzziness is involved in the observer report. Anyway, that interpretation could mean an intuitive, but not a formal, way to approach membership degrees in that particular case. In the companion paper in this issue (Part 2) we examine statistical management and analysis of fuzzy experimental data by quantifying the amount of information about the experiment that is contained in available data, and using the quantification above to compare experiments and to determine the minimum increase in sample size to remove the loss of information due to fuzziness.