From: dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
Date: Thu Jul 31 1997 - 10:32:22 MDT
On Thu, 31 Jul 1997, Ian Goddard wrote:
I too am a fan of fuzziness (so useful to the rhetorician, don't you
know), but I have to say that sentences like the following puzzle me a
bit.
> While the physical facts are always
> 100% true, our statements about them
> may be true, more or less. Fuzzy logic
> measures the degree of "more or less."
How does the term "true" relate to the world *apart from* our descriptions
of it? I am under the impression that we apply the honorific "true"
mostly just to those descriptions of the world that we believe to be good
in the way of belief, statements that better yield seeming success in the
attainment of ends and anticipation of experience than others on offer.
As far as the world itself goes, it seems to me simply to exist, and to be
so constituted that the application *to it* of some descriptions rather
than others yields such successes. But to say of the world that it is
somehow "true" as well seems to me misleading and even a bit theological.
Ick. As far as fuzzy logic nudging our assessments of truth-claims from
bivalence to multivalence goes, however, I'm already completely won over.
As I said, it's just a quibble. Best, Dale
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