What is the source of fuzziness?

Abstract

Fuzziness is characteristic of the way people use natural languages. Over the centuries, philosophers, linguists, and logicians independently discovered and commented on many aspects of fuzziness, but without a common foundation for organizing and relating their discoveries. In their historical survey, Dubois, Ostasiewicz, and Prade [2] cited numerous examples: Looking back in time, what is really amazing is the diversity of fields, where intuitions about fuzziness were expressed and more or less formalized, and the number of scientists who participated to the emergence of the fuzzy set concept. Also it is surprising to see how long it took before such a simple, although powerful, idea of graded membership, could be cast into a proper, widely accepted mathematical model, due to the far-ranged vision, the tenacity, and the numerous seminal papers of Lotfi Zadeh. Dubois et al. presented a thorough survey of the mathematical methods for quantifying and computing with and about fuzziness. Zadeh [14] identified fuzzy logic and "computing with words" (CWW). Mendel, Zadeh, and others [6] discussed the challenge of relating the CWW methodology to the semantic issues in linguistics and the technology for natural language processing (NLP). This article surveys the issues and suggests some ways for relating them. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.