Publisher's Synopsis
The present book, showing the meandering of the authors within the intricate grove of aspects of different nature (technical, mathematical and epistemological) of fuzziness, offers to the reader a chance for easily focusing the main questions of an interdisciplinary debate. The reader can, in fact, inspect nooks and crannies of this forest more hidden than those of a casual visitor even of the authors themselves, under the guide of this book which is both a Baedeker of an unknown territory and a preliminary map. The reader is allowed, then, to form a personal idea of the questions involved and possibly to afford the questions in a new way, when looking for a personal investigation on them.The meandering touches upon, in fact, very general questions at the interplay of epistemology, logic and applications. Think about, for instance, the connection between fuzziness and vagueness. Are they only different names used by different communities of scholars or they represent truly different ways of looking at what happens in our representations when we depart from the reassuring (but limiting) picture of a black and white world without any shade? More, is the theory of fuzziness measures only a sort of extension of the notion of information in a fuzzy world or is (also) something more? Enric Trillas strongly argues in favor of a radical thesis: "this theory is what definitely certifies that fuzziness is a scientific notion, since measurabilility is one of the essential requirements to be scientific." This import of this point of view is wider that it can seem, since it also paves the way, indicating general conditions to be fulfilled, for accepting as "scientific" also any other different formal explicatum of the informal explicandum of vagueness.By moving around the woods under the guide of the authors, the reader will also discover that all the meaningful results have been found since a useful and apt conceptual environment did exist. The one of information sciences under the changing of different labels and characterizing names, Cybernetics, System theory before names that are still in the arena. The presence of this favorable context is what allowed to pose "meaningful questions" which, subsequently, helped the discovery of innovative results. The book presents a mixture of unpublished essays and already published ones which had been presented, along the time, to difference audiences. The former stress the joint relevance of the latter ones which would have not appeared by seeing the single items in isolation. The book offers an original view on the intricacy of the relationships among conceptual questions and technical developments which certainly will help the reader to move with much easy in the intricacy and the darkness of the forest where the authors dared, first, to move.
