On Some Classical Tenets and Fuzzy Logic

Abstract

A fertile seed dropped by Zadeh’s work into the soil of classical logic, refers to the possibility of reconsidering some of the tenets logicians seems to preserve with almost no actual debate with thinkers in the ‘fuzzy’ community of researchers. The flourishing potentiality of that seed is partially due to the different perspective from which fuzzy logic looks at what is its object in comparison with what the classical views maintain. Such a different perspective comes, in a first place, by considering imprecise linguistic terms, linguistic connectives, modifiers and quantifiers as the objects to be represented, instead of the classical formal ones, and commonsense reasoning processes instead of formal ones. That is, for instance, for trying to mathematically and computationally modeling the Natural Language’s expressions with which some dynamical systems are described, or can only be described when no precise mathematical models of them are available. Almost always these expressions are not representable with classical sets without modifying their meaning as it is given by their use under some purpose in the corresponding context. Context-sensitive and purpose-driven meaning are typical characteristics shown by the problems fuzzy logic deals with.