On proof‐ and model‐based techniques for reasoning with uncertainty

In this article we compare two well‐known techniques for reasoning with uncertainty—namely, Incidence Calculus and Fagin‐Halpern's version of the Theory of Evidence—from a viewpoint not so frequently explored for such techniques. We argue that, despite the equivalence relations that these techniques have been proved to hold, they have intrinsically different rǒles as representations of uncertainty for automated reasoning, in the sense that the former represents approximations to uncertainty values due to impossibility to achieve exact results by proof‐theoretic means, and the latter represents model‐theoretic limits of definability of uncertainty values. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.