Counterfactuals and other philosophical challenges to machine intelligence: a fuzzy view

The author attempt to map out some of the remaining challenges to artificial intelligence from the point of view of the philosophy of fuzzy logic. He shows that human reasoning is an extremely complex procedure which is able to handle such problems as counterfactual truth, which are difficult to explain in terms of logical theory. To achieve this, one needs to understand them in a more natural manner than just using the standard positivistic logic to do so. Counterfactual reasoning employs notions like the distance between possible worlds and the mental cost of reasoning. Also, the whole notion of truth becomes a problematic explanandum, instead of being an explanans. Certain key ideas of Zadeh (1997) are used as points of reference