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generally of uncertainty, their relationship with the concepts underlining Fuzzy Set
Theory (FST) and the links with medicine. We have already discussed these aspects
in a broader setting [5, 7], as well as in other domains [1, 6, 8] and the specific
topic has been given an historically perspective treatment in [4]. We stipulate that
in a setting where the classical scientific pillars of repeatability, accuracy and ex-
act measures have to confront themselves with the much more vague concepts of
moral, vagueness, feelings, etc. the introduction and heavy application of fuzzi-
ness becomes of paramount importance. Fuzziness, we claim, is the only scientific
notion in mankind's history in the framework of which a tentative step to cross the
border of all the received classification of disciplines has been made; and while even
in this context we recognize the need for a sort of
precision
, fuzziness has differen-
tiated itself by never superimposing the concept itself with the notion of
numerical
accuracy
.
Sadegh-Zadeh acknowledges this beautifully in his book: he promotes FST
among the basic instruments of logic for medical understanding (how true); high-
lights the importance of vagueness in the medical language and as an intrinsic
property of medical epistemics; points out the clear advantages of a medical fuzzy
taxonomy to get over the binary concepts of healthy/ill; advanced the idea of the
organism as a fuzzy-causal system, representable through the schematics of a fuzzy
machine; clearly states that self-consciousness is based on subjective mental states
that are fuzzy in nature, and as a consequence their matching mental terms cannot
be agreed upon; uses the concepts from FST as a tool to introduce both the no-
tion of disease and the notion of similarity needed in analyzing the resemblance
of individual diseases with prototypes; employes the bag of tools from FST to as-
sess an explicatum of the notions of health, illness, and disease, and in the same
fuzzy framework demonstrates their fuzzy character, and the fact that the concepts
of health, illness, and disease turn out to be three completely different categories;
gives a convincing description of a fuzzy etiology using fuzzy causal structures
and fuzzy causal spaces; theorizes and details fuzzy counterparts for medical di-
agnosis, epistemology, concept formation, ontology and many other concepts. In
synthesis Sadegh-Zadeh offers a significant contribution to systematization of FST
in medicine, elevating fuzziness as a first class citizen among the foundational tools
needed to define the analytic philosophy of medicine.
The consequences of this treatment are staggering, and will contribute to a change
in the perception of what medicine is: all the people - the scientist, the physician, the
patient, the philosopher of science - working in such a crucial field move, operate
and reason in the
terra nullius
between what we would call
scientific medicine
,a
facet of medical praxiology, and what in fact still remains, in a very specified and
pregnant sense, an art: the
medical art
, which encompasses many of the factors of
medical epistemology and deontic. The boundaries between those two modalities
are, as always, not sharp at all, and sometimes the gap between them seem about to
be filled, at least for some specific angle. But this is rarely the case, and maybe this
chasm can be reduced to a slit, but never completely filled. Hopefully in the future,
by acknowledging its existence and treating it with the tools offered by FST in the
spirit of Sadegh-Zadeh's approach, the gap could become so thin as the one existing
