Is there a need for fuzzy logic? (Q931085)

This paper's first part surveys the core ideas which the author has developed to build up what he calls fuzzy logic, and what should clearly be distinguished from mathematical fuzzy logics: it is a bunch of partly heuristic methods to transform natural language based, and hence often vague, information into a computer-accessible form. Core ideas are the graduation, the granulation, and certain forms of specification of information. The author gives here in a unified form the most important ideas for the development of this field which he offered mainly during the last decade, building upon ideas which first had been presented in the 1970s. In a second part, well realized as well as potential applications are sketched, with main focus on various forms of natural language processing. It is those AI-related applications which seem to call for a more mathematical treatment of those ideas.