Re: JP Barlow, Ph.D, Social Engineering

Dr. Rich Artym (rartym@galacta.demon.co.uk)
Wed, 25 Sep 1996 02:59:12 +0100

Kathryn, the rise of fuzzy logic is not an excuse for mental sloppiness!
Fuzzy logic is every bit as formal and exacting as binary logic. It's
not a free pass allowing every handwaver and charlatan to claim that he
has the backing of science and mathematics. It deals with uncertain
facts very formally, and you can *NOT* claim the backing of Bart Kosko
if what you are trying to do is to manipulate uncertain facts sloppily.

Fuzzy logic *IS* a logic (ie. a mathematical formalism), not a charter
for denial of logic or mathematics. Quite the opposite: reasoning with
fuzzy sets is *AT LEAST* as precise as reasoning with 2-valued sets,
since it's a superset of binary logic, and often it is *MORE* precise
when used to describe the factual world because it allows reasoning with
real measured values instead of requiring those real values to be
approximated by zero or one, which would *lose* precision.

I think that you have misunderstood Kosko badly, possibly because of the
informal nature of his most popular paperback. I suggest that you leaf
through one of his textbooks if you gained the impression that fuzzy
logic is not strict, formal, mathematical, and wonderfully more precise
than binary logic as a means of reasoning about the world.

Rich.

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