Not Exactly

Title: Not Exactly – In Praise of Vagueness

Author: Kees van Deemter

Publisher: Oxford 2010 (First)

ISBN: 978-0-19-954590-2

Pages: 313

Kees van Deemter is a Reader in Computer Science at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His work involves computer speech and writing and the logical, linguistic and philosophical issues these raise. This book is an attempt to introduce the concept of vagueness which we encounter everywhere from language, science to computers. We usually use the terms moderately cool, reasonably tall and the like without thinking twice about the lack of clarity these terms bring in their wake. However, without exception, those words pass off as perfectly acceptable in everyday transactions. In science too – in which precise language is a creed – such terms are quite often used. The parameter of BMI (Body Mass Index) and IQ ratings are all plagued by the uncertainty in meaning, even though the technical community has conferred an arbitrary threshold to separate the individual entries into groups like obese, highly intelligent etc. Part 1 of the book introduces the concepts of vagueness which are useful in everyday life and in science. Part 2 is devoted to linguistic and logical theories that are proposed to make sense of vagueness while the third part is mainly an overview to summarize the points conveyed.

Natural languages abound with vague words. Noam Chomsky’s attempts to make a computer determine whether a sentence is grammatical and Richard Montague’s efforts to obtain its meaning are seminal work on reducing arbitrariness. English boasts of a number of very popular adjectives which are all vague. The top ten in the list are (number of occurrences in the corpus are given in brackets), last (140,063), other (135,185), new (115,523), good (100,652), old (66,999), great (64,369), high (52,703), small (51,626), different (48,373) and large (47,185). Hedges such as ‘probably’, ‘apparently’ and ‘may be’ are indicators of uncertainty. Removing them all may change the intention and meaning of the sentence. This actually happened when the British secret service removed the vague words from the dossier on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and ended up ‘sexing up’ the document which led everntually to a war in the Middle East.

Normal apparatus of classical logic, with its clear cut definitions and Boolean logic is unsuitable for reasoning with ambiguity and the gradable notions on which empirical science is based. The author goes on to demonstrate in length how classical logic can mathematically represent vagueness. The theoretical forays go to such depth and are so involved and uninteresting that he instructs the readers to skip those portions if they want. While classical logic is helpless to define vagueness, prompting degree theories like fuzzy logic come to the centre stage to handle the monster. The notion almost true is perfectly valid in fuzzy logic, while quite useless in the classical one. An application of fuzzy logic is in Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has reached maturity through fifty years, after the extravagant claims in its youthful era going unachieved. Chess programs are now powerful enough to defeat human grand masters. The latest weapon in the mathematical arsenal to deal with uncertainty is game theory, of which a brief introduction is given in the book.

The book is utterly boring, uninspiring, uninteresting and a pure waste of time. I hope there is no vagueness in the above sentence! The author takes precaution early on in warning the readers that a philosophical mind is essential for appreciating the contents, but the content is so out of touch with real use and is packed with haughty proclamations of jargon. There are too many spelling errors, quite unbecoming of a publisher so honoured in the field. The author is so  convinced of his stature in the field that he quotes from eleven of his research publications in the foot notes section. He might probably be the most quoted author in the reference section too!

Altogether this book may be avoided as it is completely unintelligible (at least for me). Attempts to read the book are highly discouraged.

Rating: 1 Star