CEFISES Seminar: Victoria Van Gheem, “Formalizing Medical Reasoning: Can Fuzzy Logic Account for Normativity?”

Series: Work-in-Progress

Speaker: Victoria Van Gheem (UCLouvain)

Title: “Formalizing Medical Reasoning: Can Fuzzy Logic Account for Normativity?”

Abstract

In his Handbook of Analytic Philosophy of Medicine, Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh (2015) defends that fuzzy logic is the most appropriate logic for formalizing medical reasoning. His argument is based on the view that medicine is intrinsically uncertain, and that many of its concepts are vague. If we accept that medicine is indeed uncertain and conceptually vague, fuzzy logic — designed precisely as a solution to the vagueness problem— appears as a suitable logical tool for medical reasoning.

In this explorative talk, I will advance 2 hypotheses.

First, I will attempt to clarify the notions of uncertainty and vagueness in medicine. The vagueness of medical concepts is neither accidental, nor a problem to be overcome; it is an intrinsic and significant property of the discipline, rooted in its deontic status.

Second, I will attempt to extend Sadegh-Zadeh’s work by addressing the normative dimension of medicine. Medicine is vague, and its vagueness can be accounted for by fuzzy logic. But medicine is also normative. Thus, can normativity be accounted for by fuzzy logic? What properties of normativity must be preserved to provide a faithful model of medical reasoning? Can fuzzy logic be an adequate logical framework for formalizing norms?

Using fuzzy logic as a case study, the goal of this talk is to clarify the nature of normativity in medicine and to provide an initial account of what should be expected from a formalisation of medical reasoning that includes the normative part of medicine.