Reasoning and Language at Work A Critical Essay

This book furthers the historical and technical debate by looking at reasoning as the action of language when it is devoted to explaining or foretelling, based on the authors’ centennial combined experience in fuzzy logic. A simple logical model mixing abductions and deductions is introduced in order to attain speculations, conjectures that may be responsible for induction, and creativity in reasoning. A central point and a dire hypothesis of the book are that such process can be implemented by computation and as such can lead to a new approach to automatic thinking and reasoning. On top of the technical approach, the relationship between reasoning and thinking is also analyzed trying to establish links with notions and concepts of thinkers from the European Middle Age to the current days.

This book is recommended to young researchers that are interested in either the scientific or philosophical aspects of computational thinking, and can further the debate between the two approaches.

Part 1: Reasoning.- Introduction.- Trying to Define the Main Problem. Measurable Meaning.- A Formal Skeleton of Commonsense Reasoning.- Examples on the Analysis of Statements Through Design.- The Problem of Monotonicity and the Skeleton.- Conclusions For Part 1.- Part 2: From a Perceptive Point of View.- Introduction.- The Linguistic Continua.- Quasi-Transitivity.- Context, Inference’s Safety, Proving and Further Comments.- Conclusions for Part 2.- Part 3: Fuzzy Calculi, the Context and Historical Roots.- An Overview on Fuzzy Calculi.- Common Reasoning in a Computational Context.- Looking for Some Historical Roots.- The End: General Conclusions.