JSL volume 88 issue 4 Cover and Front matter

‘Fuzzy logic’ means different things to different people. For some it is a philosophy of life – “a way to break the stranglehold that the black-and-white thinking of the Western tradition has upon us.” For others it is a more accurate way of describing our ordinary language (and thought) “in which we do not think that everything is either true or false but where we recognize the shades of grey that populate our thought and linguistic communication.” Some see fuzzy logic as an ontological device that “more accurately describes reality than claiming that, for every existent item a and for every property F, either a manifests F or a manifests not-F.” Some theorists view the fuzzy-classical debate as being a modern analog-digital debate; and in various engineering fields, fuzzy logic is viewed as the background theoretical framework in which dials that are varied to degree n result in a greater change somewhere else in the factory (or machine) than had the dial not been varied quite to degree n.