The Problem of Monotonicity and the Skeleton

The premise p of a reasoning is usually a complex statement reflecting the information of departure and consisting in the conjunction of other statements, p = p1 · (p2 · (…(pn). Such p can be written without parenthesis provided conjunction is associative, and then with the possibility of placing the sub-indexes in any ordering if it is commutative; on the contrary neither parenthesis, nor ordering can be avoided.

Didactical note: probabilistic conditionality in a Boolean algebra

This note deals with two logical topics and concerns Boolean Algebras from an elementary point of view. First we consider the class of operations on a Boolean Algebra that can be used for modelling ``If-then" propositions. These operations, or Conditionals, are characterized under the hypothesis that they only obey to the Modus Ponens-Inequality, and it is shown that only six of them are boolean two-place functions. Is the Conditional Probability the Probability of a Conditional? This problem will be only considered, with the Material Conditional Operation, on a Boolean Algebra endowed with a finite probability and in three different cases: with the Internal-Conditional Probability, with th…

Uncertainty, Information Dynamics, and Decision in Complex Systems.

Common Reasoning in a Computational Context

In the field of Computation Science, ‘Commonsense Reasoning’ usually expresses the formalization of Logic systems in order to efficiently automate replication of human performances. This is done by employing methodologies from Computational Learning, and deals with the construction of information of both deductive and inductive nature. The process often happens in an ecologic, natural context (i.e., in the real world, not in an artificial laboratory setting), and in presence of incomplete and imprecise information.

A Few Remarks on the Roots of Fuzziness Measures

In the forty years from the introduction of Fuzzy Entropy, fuzziness measures has been employed in many different fields pertaining both hard and soft sciences, from medicine to art, from engineering to linguistics. If we look back at the road traveled, we can safely state that on of the main reasons for this enduring presence, and maybe the most underrated, is the truly uniqueness of the concept of fuzziness. Far from a reminiscence, this consideration is more of a projection on the future of fuzziness: we strongly believe that the innovation implicit in the concept, while having sometime hindered in the past its perception as a powerful paradigm and tool for the hard science community, wi…

Quasi-transitivity

Seeing ordinary reasoning in the setting of the Poincaré continua by means of T-Indistinguishability Operators, opens a window towards the possibility of considering alternative types of transitivity. Let us concentrate on the so called quasi-transitive law.

Intelligenza artificiale

La ricerca come necessità, il Mezzogiorno come metafora.

Measures of Fuzziness and Information: some challenges from reflections on aesthetic experience

Evaluating aesthetic in arts is, by sheer consensus, a daunting task. Even when all the social, historic and politic considerations are stripped from the living flesh of the piece – and with them most of what differentiates creation from description – the folk concept that beauty stems from some sort of order/chaos relationship, formalized by G. D. Birkhoff as the aesthetic measure, requires an adequate and consistent quantification of both factors. Old and new approaches to the problem generally resort to classical definitions of information and entropy (Shannon entropy, Kolmogorov-Solomonoff complexity) and their derivatives, neglecting the fact that compactness and repetition have a diff…

Varieties of Vagueness, Fuzziness and a few foundational (and ontological) questions

In this paper we discuss the multifaceted nature of vagueness, the limits of (standard) set theory in dealing with the foundational aspects that a really innovating theory of vagueness should manifest, and the difficul- ties in outlining the possible features that such a type of new formalism should exhibit in order to be able to deal with such innovative aspects. We shall highlight some aspects of the role that Fuzzy Set Theory (FST) can play in this process.

Predicato vago

Modelli, teorie e l' "immateriale"

Critica della conoscenza e crescita dell’Italia

On "Explicandum" versus "Explicatum"

The aim of this paper is twofold. First of all I want to present some old ideas revisited in the light of some of the many interesting new developments occurred in the course of these last ten years in the field of the foundations of fuzziness. Secondly I desire to present a tentative general framework in which it is possible to compare different attitudes and different approaches to the clarification of the conceptual problems arising from fuzziness and soft computing. In the paper, then, I shall use some names as banners to indicate a (crucial) problem (i.e., Carnap’s problem, von Neumann’s problem, Galileian science, Aristotelian science and so on). As it will be clear by reading the pap…

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

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 meani…

Insieme fuzzy

Fuzziness and social life: Informal notions, formal definitions

A clear bidirectional path exists between everyday social and cultural life and the formal notions of uncertainty. If in recent times there has been a resurgence of the contribution of the formal notions of fuzziness and vagueness to disciplines such as aesthetics, medicine and more generally humanities, it is also true that concepts and phenomena from everyday reality are continually and usefully reused in order to build formal definitions that are more akin to the essence of things. In this paper, some notions connected with the handling of uncertainty, and particularly with FST, are outlined with the aim of benefitting the spontaneous emergence of new paths toward an unified theory of un…

Appunti per una storia dell'Istituto

Concepts, Theories and Applications

“Imagination and Rigor: their interaction along the way to measuring fuzziness and doing other strange things”

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CONTRO IL DECLINO. Una (modesta) proposta per un rilancio della competitività economica e dello sviluppo culturale dell'Italia

Introduzione. Questo libro è in realtà un appello. Un lungo e accorato appello a combattere, prima che sia troppo tardi, il declino verso cui l’Italia si è incamminata da troppo tempo. Combatterlo significa, in primo luogo, assumere la consapevolez- za piena che il declino esiste. Riconoscere apertamente e senza infin- gimenti che da almeno quindici anni il paese non regge più il passo con il resto d’Europa e con gran parte del resto del mondo. È possibile misurare con chiari e inequivocabili indicatori quan- titativi – con i numeri – questa continua e progressiva erosione del- la competitività del nostro paese in ambito economico. In tutta la prima parte di questo libro (Il declino) cerche…

Fuzziness, Cognition and Cybernetics: a historical perspective

In the present paper, we connect some old reflections about the relationships existing between the theory of fuzzy sets and cybernetics with modern, contemporary analyses of the crucial (better: unavoidable) role that fuzziness plays in the attempts at scientifically describing aspects of information sciences. The connection, which has a basic conceptual origin, has been triggered also by the recent 50th anniversary of Norbert Wiener’s death which has been instrumental in looking again at some crucial aspects of the birth of information sciences in the midst of the last century. Fuzzy sets are an essential part of this revolution and share all the innovations as well as the difficulties of …

On Some “family resemblances” of Fuzzy Set Theory and Human Sciences

The aim of this paper is to underline the importance of detecting similarities or at least, ‘family resemblances’ among different fields of investigation. As a matter of fact, the attention will be focused mainly on fuzzy sets and a few features of human sciences; however, I hope that the arguments provided and the general context outlined will show that the problem of picking up (dis)similarities among different disciplines is of a more general interest. Usually strong dichotomies guide out attempts at understanding the paths along which scientific research proceed; i.e., soft versus hard sciences, humanities versus the sciences of nature, Naturwissenschaften versus Geisteswissenschaften, …

Remarks on the development of Cybernetics

In the present paper a few aspects of the historical development of Cybernetics will be discussed. The aim is to show that by examining the epistemological problems behind these aspects of its development, we can acquire some useful tools for a better understanding of the current state of some of the theories and disciplines, related to information processing, which evolved out of that explosion of innovative ideas and which in the 1950s, combined and gave rise to the birth of novel and interesting paths of investigation.

Birkhoff's aesthetics, Arnheim's entropy. Some remarks on complexity and fuzzy entropy in arts

A judgement of aesthetic in arts is, by sheer consensus, a daunting task that requires evaluation of a whole host of endogenous and exogenous cultural factors. A few of them can actually provide very useful hints in tackling foundational problems in Information Science in a more natural setting than what is usually provided by a typical engineering stance. This interaction can however work the other way about, as instruments from the Information and Computer Science toolkit may help in focusing the less explored features of art and its evaluation. When all the social, historical, hermeneutical and political considerations are stripped from the living flesh of the piece, we lose most of wha…

A naïve way of looking at fuzzy sets

In this study, we consider the concept of a predicate (P) in a universe of discourse X from a specific viewpoint, i.e., the informational viewpoint with respect to its linguistic use. Its meaning and its different types are considered, particularly by considering the predicates that are "measurable" and designate a "collective" (P) in X, which is not always a classical subset of X. We show that the collective P manifests itself in different "states" or fuzzy sets, where knowledge and representation depend on the available information regarding the use of the predicate P in X. We also analyze the linguistic concept of a "collective" where the fuzzy sets are nothing other than informational s…

"The human use of human beings": Interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and all that in biophysics and beyond.

Abstract Biophysics, just by looking at its name, indicates an interdisciplinary scientific activity, although the notion of interdisciplinarity, as such, seems to be not widely or specifically discussed by biophysicists. The same seems to have happened as well in the early stages of the development of cybernetics, notably in Norbert Wiener's writings. This situation seems to contrast with what has happened in subsequent developments of cybernetics ideas, notably in general system theory and cognitive sciences. After a few general reflections on the notion of interdisciplinarity, its sophisticated variants and the path leading to the birth of cognitive science, we shall refer to Wiener's th…

Introduction

In the intention of the authors, this booklet does not want to be a textbook; instead, it contains some reflections that aim to guide ‘Computing with Words and Percep- tions’, Zadeh’s final view on his Fuzzy Logic, towards its future as a new science of both Language and Reasoning. Towards an experimental and theoretical science concerning the Natural Phenomena of Language, Thinking and Reasoning, in rela- tionship with Neurosciences, whose possibilities are foreseen by the authors.

A Formal Skeleton of Commonsense Reasoning

After referring several times to Commonsense or Ordinary Reasoning, let’s devote a few pages to present a (minimal) mathematical model of it that can be seen as the ‘Skeleton’ of Reasoning, since it is defined by a set of few, simple laws appearing in the models of particular and specialized modes of reasoning like, for instance: Boolean Algebras for the reasoning with precise concepts; Orto-modular lattices for the reasoning with the concepts of Quantum Physics; and also in the so called Algebras of Fuzzy Sets for the reasoning with imprecise concepts, and among them De Morgan-Kleene algebras. All these models have interesting applications.

OLTRE IL DECLINO. Come, quando, con chi?

Formalizzazione della vaghezza

Vita, morte e miracoli di Alan Mathison Turing

La vita di Turing si puo leggere in molte biografie: ottima ed enciclopedica quella di Andrew Hodges (pubblicata in Italia da Bollati Boringhieri); molto piacevole l’agile libretto di Gianni Rigamonti, Turing, il genio e lo scandalo (Flaccovio editore, Palermo, 1991). In entrambi i libri si possono anche trovare cenni alla sua tragica fine, della quale la societa inglese di quel tempo non puo certo menar vanto; ma chissa come si sarebbero comportate altre societa.

Fuzziness in Italy – Traces of a scattered history

The history of Fuzziness in Italy is varied and scattered among a num- ber of research groups. As a matter of fact, “fuzziness” spread in Italy through a sort of spontaneous diffusion, and, also subsequently, no one felt the need to cre- ate some “national” common structure like an Association or similar things. Since a cohesive retelling would be next to impossible, a few members of the Italian fuzzy community have been asked to recount their experience and express their hopes for the future.

A thread through challenging questions

In the pages which follow I shall try to present a network relating some challenging different problems and questions; questions and problems which in different forms have been discussed with Enric along the years. The thread, of course, is constructed by me and now, and is based on my memory, choices and preferences. For these reasons I am not sure that Enric will totally agree with the particular way in which I have intertwined the different elements composing the thread as well as the pieces it connects. However I presume that this thread - also in the specific subjective form as it appears - will show, anyway, some elements of Enric’s activity and the way in which we have interacted alo…

FUZZINESS: the emergence of a new scientific concept

Conclusions for Part II

Human beings are animals endowed with a great curiosity. They continuously ask themselves how things are, where they come from, and where they go to. Questioning is at the origins of reasoning; and possibly, without the capability of self-questioning and guessing, neither directed thinking, nor reasoning, will exist. Their existence makes them a matter of study.

Steps to a Definition of Information Dynamics

Fuzziness, Cognition and Cybernetics: an outlook on future

In the present paper, we connect some old reflections about the relationships existing between the theory of fuzzy sets and cybernetics with modern, contemporary analyses of the crucial (better: unavoidable) role that fuzziness plays in the attempts at scientifically describing aspects of information sciences. The connection, which has a basic conceptual origin, has been triggered also by the recent 50th anniversary of Norbert Wiener’ death which has been instrumental in looking again at some crucial aspects of the birth of information sciences in the midst of last Century. Fuzzy sets are an essential part of this revolution and share all the innovations as well as the difficulties of this …

Logiche a più valori

Cibernetica, informatica, Mezzogiorno

Do Uncertainty and Fuzziness Present Themselves (and Behave) in the Same Way in Hard and Human Sciences?

In the present paper the question whether uncertainty and fuzziness present themselves and behave in the same way (or not) in hard and human sciences will be briefly discussed. This problem came out from the attempt to answer the question asked by Lotfi Zadeh on the (apparent) strangeness of a very limited use of fuzzy sets in human sciences.

Specificities and Vagaries of Medicine from the Viewpoint of Hard Sciences

Among many other beautiful reflections on the ontology of medicine, in his Handbook of Analytic Philosophy of Medicine, Sadegh Zadeh promotes Fuzzy Sets Theory among the basic instruments of logic for medical understanding, highlights the importance of vagueness in the medical language and as an intrinsic property of medical epistemology, and invokes the clear advantages of a medical fuzzy taxonomy to overcome the binary concept of being healthy/ill. We briefly discuss these aspects, relating them to the peculiarity of Fuzziness as the only purely scientific notion among the foundational tools needed to define an analytic philosophy of medicine more concerned with an explicatum of the notio…

Fuzzy Set Theory as a methodological bridge between hard science and humanities

In this paper, we will investigate the possible role of fuzzy set theory (FST), and more generally the ensemble of technologies and theoretical approaches known as soft computing, as a method- ological bridge between hard sciences and humanities. We will try, building on previous works, to investigate the “family links” between these disciplines and show how FST may be of help in promoting a connection between the “two cultures”. We will discuss Carnap and his paradox of explication, the dilemma between imagination and rigor according to Bateson, the problem of interdisciplinarity, and the consequences of precision and exactness.

Fuzzy Set Theory as a Methodological Bridge between Hard Sciences and Humanities

In this paper, we will investigate the possible role of fuzzy set theory (FST), and more generally the ensemble of technologies and theoretical approaches known as soft computing, as a methodological bridge between hard sciences and humanities. We will try, building on previous works, to investigate the “family links” between these disciplines and show how FST may be of help in promoting a connection between the “two cultures”. We will discuss Carnap and his paradox of explication, the dilemma between imagination and rigor according to Bateson, the problem of interdisciplinarity, and the consequences of precision and exactness. C

Io Robot, la (fanta)scienza e le altre

Presentazione in termini accessibili a un vasto pubblico di alcuni problemi centrali della robotica, l'intelligenza atificiale, la teoria della calcolabilità con cenni alla vita di A. M. Turing.

Conclusions for Part I

Thanks to thinking, memory, and language, human beings can dedicate a non-minor part of their time to tell, themselves or the others, events, descriptions, true or imagined histories, etc. Part of the human conversation consists in telling, and most of the times reasoning starts from the self-telling of something.

Scienza, Mezzogiorno, “progetto Paese”

Ensemble flou

Some reflections on Fuzzy Set Theory as an Experimental Science

The aim of this paper is to open a critical discussion on the claim, recently presented in the community and especially heralded by Enric Trillas, that fuzzy logic should be seen as an “experimental science”. The first interesting aspect of such remark is whether and in which way such position has consequences on the real development of the research, or if it is simply a (different) way of looking at the same phenomenon. As a consequence, we investigate the possible connection to Zadeh’s distiction between Fuzzy logic in a restricted sense and in a general sense. We shall argue that Trillas’s claim not only strongly supports the necessity for such a distinction, but provides a path of inves…

An Overview of the Fuzzy Calculi

What has been discussed up to now allows us to assume that the roots of fuzzy sets are in Language and, thus, that Fuzzy Logic deals with both Language and Commonsense Reasoning. Fuzzy Logic’s main goal is the representation of statements whose meaning is not precise, but it can as well capture the case in which statements are precise.

La cibernetica e il ’68.

On Fuzziness, Its Homeland and Its Neighbour

It has been frequently remembered (also in the invitation letter to contribute to the present volume) that in his 1962 paper [27] which is a sort of proto-manifesto of fuzzy sets [28], Zadeh among the possible names that could denote the new notion he was trying to introduce, basides fuzzy, mentioned the term cloudy. If he had chosen this last one as the name of the theory, today we had contributed to a volume On Cloudiness.

Out of a creative jumble of ideas in the middle of last Century: Wiener, interdisciplinarity, and all that

Is Biophysics an interdisciplinary science? In order to answer this rhetorical question, it can be useful to look back at history of disciplines, as well as that of the scientific institutions helping their development. In this contribution some aspects of the unusual hodgepodge of concepts involving Biophysics, the legacy of Cybernetics, cognitive science and the central figure of Norbert Wiener are presented and discussed.

Una Multiversitas per l'Italia in frantumi

Looking for Some Historical Roots

Knowledge comes from the observation that what surrounds us is provoked by the questions people poses when thinking on it; is reachecorrespondingd thanks to reasoning, and usually through establishing hypotheses and further testing them and their consequences against the reality. Speculation lays at the basic level of both ‘thinking on it’, and ‘establishing and testing hypotheses’.

Explicandum vs Explicatum and Soft Computing

The aim of this paper is twofold. First af all I want to present some old ideas revisited in the light of some of the many interesting new developments occurred in the course of these last ten years in the field of the foundations of fuzziness. Secondly I desire to present a tentative general framework in which it is possible (or at least it is possible FOR ME) to compare different attitudes and different approaches to the clarification of the conceptual problems arising from fuzziness and soft computing.

On Some Vagaries of Vagueness and Information

The presence of vagueness in scientific theories (in particular, to those related to and connected with the management of information) is briefly analyzed. We consider, firstly, the problem whether vague predicates can be adequately represented by existing formal theories. A negative answer to this question produces, as a by-product, the suggestion that a good semantics for fuzzy sets can be offered by the notion of “distance from idealized items”. Secondly, some questions connected with the adequacy of “theories of information” to the multifaceted informal notion of “information” suggest to afford this problem within an enlarged dynamical setting

The Life, Death and Miracles of Alan Mathison Turing

The life of Alan Turing is described in many biographies. The best and most encyclopaedic of these is that of Andrew Hodges; quite pleasant is the agile volume by Gianni Rigamonti, Turing, il genio e lo scandalo (Flaccovio editore, Palermo, 1991). Both of these also make mention of his tragic end, which certainly casts a shadow on the mores English society at the time; but of course, who knows how other societies might have behaved?

Fifty Fuzzily Gone, Many More to Go: An Appreciation of Fuzziness’ Present and an Outlook on What May Come

Fifty years of Fuzziness represents a good chance to look back on the rich history of the discipline and the scientists that were part of this history, and at the long and varied course of one of the few really innovative, disruptive ideas of the last century, including the development of its many applications. But instead we would like to take this interesting opportunity to discuss the present state of affairs, especially in relation to the application of Fuzziness to the cognitive domain. From such reflections a possible path is defined toward the evolution of Fuzziness, under the umbrella of computational intelligence, toward an all-encompassing experimental science of language, reasoni…

Misure di fuzziness

Fuzziness as an experimental science: an homage to Claudio Moraga

In this contribution we collect a few considerations and remarks on such apparently unrelated topics as: an early paper by Norbert Wiener on the Nature of Mathematics; mathematical logic’s heritage on the formalization of reasoning; cognitive aspects on the modalities of drawing conclusions. We hope that reading the present paper will show that they are, neverthless, related in some way at least for what regards the problem of reasoning in the presence of uncertainty, showing a network of concepts that can help considering again the innovating aspects of fuzziness—in our opinion a more than fit homage to Claudio Moraga’s interdisciplinary approach to fuzziness.

Errata: On Fuzziness

interdisciplinarità tra memoria e progetto

La scienza arcipelago nella cultura del nuovo millennio

Integrating resolution—like procedures with Lukasiewicz implication

We discuss some conceptual and technical problems raised by the attempt of integrating resolution-like procedures with the use of Lukukasiewicz implication Min{1, 1 – [a] + [b]} in an environment of approximate reasoning modelled by fuzzy logics.

Come riprendere il dialogo interrotto con l'industria

Il ruolo del CNR nel rapporto tra ricerca scientifica e innovazione tecnologica

Concepts, Theories, and Applications: The Role of “Experimentation” (and “Context”) for Formalizing New Ideas along Innovative Avenues

The main aim of this paper is to present a few general ideas preliminary to an assessment of the role that a correct interchange between the elaboration of new theories and an open minded experimentation can have in the development of new fields of investigation. Although many of the reflections and remarks that follow will be of a very broad type, the reference background of all the paper will be, in general, the composite field of information sciences and, more specifically, the innovative concepts and approaches introduced by fuzzy sets theory. Abe Mamdani’s work can certainly be considered as an outstanding example of the way in which these innovations arose and, subsequently, flourishe…

Some algebraic clues towards a syntactic view on the Principles of Non-Contradiction and Excluded-Middle.

This short paper just considers the possibility of a new view for posing and proving the Aristotle’s Principles of Non-Contradiction and Excluded-Middle. It is done by means of their refutability, or deducibility, respectively, under Tarski’s Consequence Operators.

Alcune osservazioni sugli Enti (pubblici) di ricerca: il loro ruolo e brevi cronache di una devastazione annunciata.

Verranno presentate alcune considerazioni sul ruolo che gli Enti di ricerca dovrebbero (e potrebbero) svolgere nel complesso sistema dell’alta formazione e di quello che ad essa è connesso (dallo sviluppo produttivo al vivere civile). La motivazione di fondo, poi, delle considerazioni che seguono è che la ricerca scientifica può svolgere un ruolo cruciale in tutti questi aspetti in quanto essa è connessa in modo essenziale all’uso di un metodo critico che fa discendere le conclusioni cui essa arriva dalle argomentazioni addotte e non dall’autorità di qualcuno.

Experimental modeling for a natural landing of fuzzy sets in new domains

In this paper we plan to touch upon (and briefly discuss) some (out of the many) contributions done by Enric Trillas to Fuzzy Sets Theory. We have carefully chosen, from the abundant panorama we have been allowed to gaze at in the years, two different but intertwined topics of a more methodological character, which—as such—are, obviously, not only outside the topics massively developed by the scientific community in this field but also not in the mainstream of Enric’s investigations. We picked up them, however, since we believe that they are related to a crucial problem for the further developments of fuzzy research in the subsequent years. In this perspective, they represent a very signifi…

Probability, fuzziness, verisimilitude

Dialoghi notturni di Norbert Wiener con se medesimo

Theory of Computation, Fuzziness and a physics of the immaterial

In this paper we advance three clear-cut proposals as a contribution to the discussion on the role of notions of Computation and Fuzziness as a bridge between Hard and Soft Sciences. We suggest that an important difference between the two great fami- lies of science lies in their subject or research having a grounding in nature or not, and that Theory of Computation is a glaring exception to this classifi- cation, being a textbook hard science but dealing with the immaterial. We further advance that such unicity is strongly connected with Church-Turing thesis, and discuss about the role of Computation and Fuzziness as pillars of immaterial sciences

Appunti per la definizione di un "Progetto Paese"

Connettivi generalizzati

Back to “Reasoning”

Is rigor always strictly related to precision and accuracy? This is a fundamental question in the realm of Fuzzy Logic; the first instinct would be to answer in the positive, but the question is much more complex than it appears, as true rigor is obtained also by a careful examination of the context, and limiting to a mechanical transfer of techniques, procedures and conceptual attitudes from one domain to another, such as from the pure engineering feats or the ones of mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning, does not guarantee optimal results. Starting from this question, we discuss some implications of going back to the very concept of reasoning as it is used in natural languag…

On the viability of an algebraic approach to non-monotonic reasoning

Technology and human sciences: A dialogue to be constructed or a common tread to be rediscovered?

In this contribution we begin to discuss the thesis that an analysis of the similarities and differences of typical methodologies of human sciences, technology and hard sciences show some unforeseen but strong similarities between human sciences and technologies. In this context fuzzy sets ideas provide useful tools which help to render the analysis more quantitative but without loosing the connection with a purely descriptive analysis. These kinds of considerations would have been hardly conceivable in the setting of XIX Century conception of science. It is the development of Information sciences that has allowed these problems to emerge. In this paper we shall then briefly outline the gen…

Future is where concepts, theories and applications meet (also in fuzzy logic)

No one knows where the future lies, and the idea of serendipity in science is now raised to something of a tropism. This does not impede our will to predict, if not the exact events, at least the short–term trends in the disciplines we live and breathe, and to point at the (subjective) glaring chances for a bright future. This volume is a clear example of the need that any living scientific discipline has for constant regrouping and redirection, in a never–ending process of consolidating results and finding new paths. In this contribution we will try and focus on a number of areas of fuzzy logic and, by extension, in the whole word of uncertainty, where (in our opinion) a number of interest…

Introduction

‘Natural Reasoning’, that with which lay people decide their daily actions, also called Ordinary, Everyday, or Commonsense Reasoning, can be seen as ruled by the universal laws defining its formal ‘skeleton’.

Reflections on Technology and Human Sciences: rediscovering a common thread through the analysis of a few epistemological features of fuzziness

A number of reasons, both historical and philosophical, has caused Technology and Human Sciences to be perceived as disjoint domains. In opposi- tion, we claim that there exists a strong methodological affinity between these apparently disconnected fields of knowledge. Our view is further corroborated by new hints from Information Sciences, in which new scientific concepts and tools such as fuzziness have emerged. Comparing the ways in which both Technology and Literature offer a model of reality we shall see that their approaches preserve a strong connection with the “description” of the pieces of reality they aim to model, against the Galileian hard sciences’ approach of making bold hypot…

Panel Summary: Planning And Plasticity in Artificial and Natural Systems

Boncinelli underlined often, during our workshop, that simplest organisms are the more robust and they survived longer than more evolved organisms (what about the quality of their life?). This depends on the fact that complex systems either natural or artificial need for more complex controls. Moreover, planning strategies, one of the steps for finding optimal solutions, must be carefully designed and it is complex too.