Reflections on fuzzy Modus Ponens

Arguably, Modus Ponens (MP) is the most important deduction rule in logic. Its many-valued truth version marked the emergence of fuzzy logic in the late sixties. It was introduced by Goguen in his famous paper `Logic of inexact concepts’, and it played a major role in establishing residuated lattices as the main general order-theoretic structure for the space of the truth values in fuzzy logic in its wider sense. In this talk, we will explore the correctness of fuzzy MP (traditionally called `soundness’), which, in general, is the single most important property of any deduction rule. We will take an abstract model-theoretic approach to this problem, and see how in the fuzzy context, we can have various different legitimate interpretations of soundness of MP.


R. Diaconescu
Last modified: Mon Oct 27 2025