文档介绍：Foreword
Scientific progress is driven, in large measure, by questioning the validity of
axioms, dogmas and traditions. One of the most deep-seated traditions in science
is that of according much more respect to numbers than to words. The essence
of this tradition was articulated inctly by Lord Kelvin in 1883:
In physical science the first essential step in the direction of learning
any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable
methods for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that
when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in
numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure
it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager
and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge but you
have scarcely in your thoughts, advanced to the state of science, whatever
the matter may be.
Adherence to the tradition of primacy of numbers over words has led to brilliant
esses that are visible to all. But does it follow that the tradition should be
accorded this status of immutable truth? No, certainly not.
The reality is that alongside brilliant esses we see sobering failure. We
have sent men to the Moon but we cannot build a robot that can play tennis.
We can puters that can execute billions of instructions per second but
cannot create programs that can summarize a non-stereotypical story, much less
a book. We cannot automate driving in city traffic and we cannot construct ma-
chine translation programs that can perform at the level of a human interpreter,
and so on. Does this reality suggest that the tradition of primacy of numbers
over words may be a part of the problem? In a sense, ‘Modelling with Words’
may be viewed as an affirmative answer to this question.
In retrospect, my 1973 paper, ‘Outline of a New Approach to the Analysis of
Complex Systems and Decision Processes,’ may be seen as an initial step in the
direction of enhancing