Everything Is a Matter of Degree: A New Theoretical Justification of Zadeh's Principle

Authors

Hung T. Nguyen
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow

Publication Date

3-2008

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-08-11a

Published in Proceedings of the 27th International Conference of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society NAFIPS'2008, New York, New York, May 19-22, 2008.

Abstract

One of the main ideas behind fuzzy logic and its applications is that everything is a matter of degree. We are often accustomed to think that every statement about a physical world is true or false -- that an object is either a particle or a wave, that a person is either young or not, either well or ill -- but in reality, we sometimes encounter intermediate situations. In this paper, we show that the existence of such intermediate situations can be theoretically explained -- by a natural assumption that the real world is cognizable.