Summary
Most traditional examples of fuzziness come from the analysis of commonsense reasoning. When we reason, we use words from natural language like “young”, “well”. In many practical situations, these words do not have a precise true-or-false meaning, they are fuzzy. One may therefore be left with an impression that fuzziness is a subjective characteristic, it is caused by the specific way our brains work. However, the fact that that we are the result of billions of years of successful adjusting-to-the-environment evolution makes us conclude that everything about us humans is not accidental. In particular, the way we reason is not accidental, this way must reflect some real-life phenomena – otherwise, this feature of our reasoning would have been useless and would not have been abandoned long ago. In other words, the fuzziness in our reasoning must have an objective explanation – in fuzziness of the real world. In this chapter, we first give examples of objective real-world fuzziness. After these example, we provide an explanation of this fuzziness – in terms of cognizability of the world.
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Nguyen, H.T., Kreinovich, V., Gamez, J.E., Modave, F., Kosheleva, O. (2009). Intermediate Degrees Are Needed for the World to Be Cognizable: Towards a New Justification for Fuzzy Logic Ideas. In: Hassanien, AE., Abraham, A., Herrera, F. (eds) Foundations of Computational Intelligence Volume 2. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 202. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01533-5_3
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