An axiomatizable logical foundation for lattice-ordered qualitative linguistic approach for reasoning with words

Abstract

It is commonsense that people do express, think, reason, and make decision directly using linguistic terms in natural language rather than using numerical quantification. How to establish the formalized approach imitating the common way of human being’s to manipulate directly linguistic terms without numerical approximation to provide the rational decision is still an open research area. Investigations on the algebraic structure of linguistic term set for varied decision making applications (especially in social science) still lack a formalism for development of strict linguistic valued logic system as a theoretical foundation and its approximate reasoning scheme in practice. To attain this goal we characterize and construct a typical structure of commonly used linguistic term sets in natural language by a lattice-ordered algebra structure – lattice implication algebra (LIA), where Łukasiewicz implication algebra, as a special case of LIA, plays a substantial role. By using Łukasiewicz logic’s axiomatizability in terms of Pavelka type fuzzy logic, we propose a new axiomatizable lattice ordered qualitative linguistic truth-valued logic system based on LIA to place an important foundation for further establishing formal linguistic truth-valued logic based approximate reasoning and decision making with applications. This proposed logic system has a distinct feature of handling comparable or incomparable linguistic terms directly without numerical quantification, will be especially beneficial for perception-based decision making processes. It attempts to enhance the quantitative theory of decision science with qualitative, algebraic and logic-oriented approaches to achieve reasoning with words.