Neutrosophic logics: Prospects and problems

Neutrosophy has been introduced some years ago by Florentin Smarandache as a new branch of philosophy dealing with the origin, nature and scope of neutralities, as well as their interactions with different ideational spectra. A variety of new theories have been developed on the basic principles of neutrosophy: among them is neutrosophic logics, a family of many-valued systems that can be regarded as a generalization of fuzzy logics. In this paper we present a critical introduction to neutrosophic logics, focusing on the problem of defining suitable neutrosophic propositional connectives and discussing the relationship between neutrosophic logics and other well-known frameworks for reasoning with uncertainty and vagueness, such as (intuitionistic and interval -valued) fuzzy systems and Belnap's logic. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.