
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 137.
Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 137.
“Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.”
The Scientific Outlook (1931)
1930s
Context: Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.
“Men! When you cannot win an argument, you either run away or resort to force.”
Egwene al'Vere
(15 November 1990)
Language as Conspiracy, p. 277
Everything Is Under Control (1998)
Context: You need the "is of identity" to describe conspiracy theories. Korzybski would say that proves that illusions, delusions, and "mental" illnesses require the "is" to perpetuate them. (He often said, "Isness is an illness.")
Korzybski also popularized the idea that most sentences, especially the sentences that people quarrel over or even go to war over, do not rank as propositions in the logical sense, but belong to the category that Bertrand Russell called propositional functions. They do not have one meaning, as a proposition in logic should have; they have several meanings, like an algebraic function.
In this context, what is important to recognize is that: (a) FL<sub>w</sub> is much broader than FL<sub>n</sub> and subsumes FL<sub>n</sub> as one of its branches; (b) the agenda of FL<sub>n</sub> is very different from the agendas of classical multivalued logics; and (c) at this juncture, the term fuzzy logic is usually used in its wide rather than narrow sense, effectively equating fuzzy logic with FL<sub>w</sub>
Zadeh (1995) in Foreword of George J. Klir Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic: theory and applications.
1990s
On Heath High School shooting where a teenaged gunman killed 3 students at a prayer meeting at the school, on Politically Incorrect (18 December 1997).
1980s-90s