Meandering Around Fuzziness

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 The book presents a mixture of unpublished essays and already published ones which had been presented, along the time, to difference audiences.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. 

 Marco Elio Tabacchi is currently a professor of Computational Logic at DMI, Università degli Studi di Palermo, and a prize-winning print-maker and aquatintist. He oversees the SCo^2 (Soft Computing for Cognitive Sciences) Research Group and the SDF Project (which aims at building an AI based geo-thematical DSS), is head of local unit of a PRIN 2022 PNRR project on Quantum Models for Logic, Computation and Natural Processes, and is a coordinator of EuSFLaT Working Group on Philosophical Foundations, as well as ambassador of the FM Square foundation. Formerly, he was the scientific director at Istituto Nazionale di Ricerche Demopolis (a position he still holds ad honorem), a mentor at PDP Tanuki spin-off, and for two mandates, a board member of AISC (Italian Association for Cognitive Science). His scientific interest lies at the borders between fuzzy DSS, complexity in Art and CL4IA. 

 

Settimo Termini was a full professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Palermo from 1990 until his retirement in 2015 and of Cybernetics and Information Theory at the University of Perugia from 1987 to 1990; a CNR researcher from 1969 to 1987 at the Institute of Cybernetics “Eduardo Caianiello” in Naples, which he, subsequently, directed from 2002 to 2009. Fellow of the International Fuzzy Systems Association (IFSA) and EUSFLAT 2017 Italian Fuzzy Pioneer Award, Vice President of the "Accademia nazionale di scienze, lettere e arti di Palermo" and President of the "Marina Diana Mercurio Association”.
A theoretical physicist by training, he has mainly dealt with the problems posed by the treatment of incomplete and revisable information in complex systems, introducing among the first in Italy issues related to fuzzy systems and initiating the theory of fuzziness measures.