The Fuzzy Logic Gambit as a Paradigm of Lotfi's Proposals

Abstract

Lotfi Zadeh, in discussing the future directions the discipline should have taken, has insisted in highlighting what he called `the Fuzzy Logic Gambit' , whose basic idea is that, when dealing with the solution of a problem through the use of Fuzzy Logic, two different type of precisions exist: ``precision in value'', which is connected to the ability of measuring reality, and ``precision in meaning'', which is what we want to attain when dealing with the real world. While the final goal of Fuzzy Logic is to provide some degree of precision to what is less precise in nature, he has brilliantly suggested that this can be obtained by bartering between precision in value and precision in meaning. The thesis we present (and argue in favor of) here is that this idea can be seen as a sort of paradigm of many proposals that Zadeh advanced along many decades of research, and that this simple observation lurks in many of the realizations that Fuzzy Logic has developed after becoming mainstream.