Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
reconstructs this gradedness “as degrees of feature matching, that is similarity be-
tween less prototypical members of the category and its prototypes. Such a category
we, therefore, call a prototype resemblance category”, [70, 120] and to establish
these kind of categories mathematically we need to use the concept of a fuzzy set.
3.6.4
Human Conditions
To clarify what is a “disease” we revisit the human conditions that we considered
already in subsection 3.6.2. 12 years ago Sadegh-Zadeh wrote that such complex
human conditions are not, and should not be, merely confined to biological states
of the organism. They may be viewed and represented as large fuzzy sets which
also contain parts that refer to the subjective, religious, transcendental and social
world of the ill, such as pain, distress, feelings of loneliness, beliefs, behavioral dis-
orders, etc.” [66, p. 621] Thus, Sadegh-Zadeh's approach to philosophy of diseases
is oriented to the actual lives, needs and interests of people in their communities
and societies. Because these human conditions build the category where the term
“disease” is applied. In 2008 he gave the following example of their “global feature
space
H
∗
:
17
H
∗
=
{
F
1
,
F
2
,
F
3
,...,
F
n
},
whith the features
F
i
,
i
∈{
1
,...,
n
},
e.g.:
H
∗
=
{
chest pain, elevated CPK concentration, tachycardia, vomiting,
anorexia, epigastric pain, rash, Koplik's spots, cought, fever,
increased whith blood count,bodily lesion, distress, discompfort,
incapacity, dependency, premature death, dyspepsia, coma,
bradycardia, elevated LDH, delusion, fear
...
etc.
...
etc.
}
H
∗
Sadegh-Zadeh represents human con-
ditions as sets of members of this “global feature space”, e.g.:
With selections of features or criteria in
•
=
{
...
...}
heart_attack
chest pain, elevated CPK concentration, tachycardia,
etc.
•
measless
=
{
rash, Koplik's spots, cough, fever
,...
etc.
...}
•
gastric_ulcer
=
{
epigastric pain, anorexia, vomiting,
...
etc.
...}
•
alopecia areata
=
{
hair loss on the scalp
,...
etc.
...}
•
being in love
=
{
happy, sleepless nights, longing for the lover
,...
etc.
...}
In analogy to the members of the category “birds' we can present members of the
category “human conditions” as in a table 3.3 showing wich features they have and
which features they not have:
We also can represent a human condition
H
by the pairs of all its features (taken
from
H
∗
) and their respective membership indicator to be present as a feature in
H
or not, as Sadegh-Zadeh showed in [70, 125]: “A feature
F
i
from feature set
H
∗
17
CPK: creatine phosphokinase is an enzyme found mainly in the heart, brain, and skeletal
muscle; LDH: lactate dehydrogenase (or lactic acid dehydrogenase) is an enzyme found
in almost all body tissues.
