Fuzziness, Philosophy, and Medicine - Fuzziness and Medicine - page 5

Fig. 1.1 Real and theoretical structural layers
theories, these classes of K and I are shown in Fig. 1.1. Thus we notice that M pp
and I are entities of an empirical layer, whereas M p and M pp are structures in a
theoretical layer of the schema.
Referring to The Structure and Dynamics of Theories [8] by the Austrian philoso-
pher of science Wolfgang Stegmüller (1923-1991), Sadegh-Zadeh stated in his arti-
cle “The Fuzzy Revolution: Goodbye to the Aristotelian Weltanschauung”- that the
concepts of Popper, Kuhn and their combatants “are still too vague and inadequate
to be useful” [2, p. 3]
Now, in his Handbook on Analytical philosophy of Medicine (see Fig. 1.2 (a))
[3], he demands an “overhaul” to adapt the structuralist metatheory to fuzzy set
theory [3, p. 439f]. He requires “to render the metatheory applicable to real world
scientific theories, it needs to be fuzzified because like everything else in science,
scientific theories are vague entities and implicitly or explicitly fuzzy. He then lists
two ways of scientific theories' explicit fuzzifications:
1. Introduction of the theory's set-theoretical predicate as a fuzzy predicate (“ x is
a fuzzy S ” instead of “ x is an S ”).
2. In addition to 1. also any other component of the theory appearing in the struc-
ture that defines the predicate may be fuzzified.
Unfortunately, Sadegh-Zadeh does not go into details at this point but he con-
cludes this section with an outlook: “Fuzzifications of both types will impact the