ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses the competing philosophies of modeling uncertainty: Probabilistic concept of reliability, safety-factor based on fuzzy sets, and convex modelling. The first two possess a measure: The one deals with probability density functions, whereas fuzzy sets-based analysis incorporates the notion of the membership function. Jennings advances the following ideas: “In many ways this poem is an excellent metaphor for science and demonstrates how science works. The blind men want to learn about the elephant, so they make observations. Good so far – in science, observations rule. The scientific method would have required them to make predictions based on their models and test them against additional observations. The blind men’s error has been common in the philosophy of science as well. Different models for the scientific method capture different aspects of the problem: induction, hypothesis, logical positivism, paradigms, falsification, and even no method.
