Ten questions and one problem on fuzzy logic

AbstractRecently, I had a very interesting friendly e-mail discussion with Professor Parikh on vagueness and fuzzy logic. Parikh published several papers concerning the notion of vagueness. They contain critical remarks on fuzzy logic and its ability to formalize reasoning under vagueness [10,11]. On the other hand, for some years I have tried to advocate fuzzy logic (in the narrow sense, as Zadeh says, i.e. as formal logical systems formalizing reasoning under vagueness) and in particular, to show that such systems (of many-valued logic of a certain kind) offer a fully fledged and extremely interesting logic [4, 5]. But this leaves open the question of intuitive adequacy of many-valued logic as a logic of vagueness. Below I shall try to isolate eight questions Parikh asks, add two more and to comment on all of them. Finally, I formulate a problem on truth (in)definability in Łukasiewicz logic which shows, in my opinion, that fuzzy logic is not just “applied logic” but rather belongs to systems commonly called “philosophical logic” like modal logics, etc