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Our daily lives are full of vagueness or fuzziness. When we describe
someone as "tall," for example, it is as though there is a particular
height beyond which a person can be considered "tall." In this
stimulating book, Kees Van Deemter cuts across various
disciplines--including artificial intelligence, logic, and computer
science--to illuminate the nature and importance of vagueness.
Van
Deemter shows why vagueness is both unavoidable and useful, and he
demonstrates how tempting--and how wrong--it often is to think in terms
of black and white, instead of the richly graded spectrum of the world
around us. Vagueness, the author argues, allows us to focus on what
matters, leaving out irrelevant details, and adding texture to what
would otherwise be unintelligible facts.
The embrace of vagueness,
however, comes at a price, for when degrees of grey are accepted,
concepts like truth, belief, and proof lose their power, and we are
banished from that paradise in which truth and falsity are the only
possibilities.
About the Author
Kees van Deemter is Reader in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen.
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Product Details
- Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN-10: 0199545901
ISBN-13: 978-0199545902
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