ABSTRACT
Some choices are pretty straightforward, and require no more than a simple selection between two courses of action, which lead to morally neutral outcomes. And indeed, sometimes we are presented with questions which beg an easy choice between ‘yes’ or ‘no’, ‘1’ or ‘0’, ‘black’ or ‘white’, ‘A’ or ‘not-A’. However, there are junctures in our lives where selection is not only tricky, but perhaps nigh impossible. In the face of a cross-examination, where the witness must ‘just answer the question, yes or no?’, she might hesitate before answering, or be uncertain of the ‘right’ response; that is not to say the witness can’t answer, but in particular circumstances a yes/no response just seems to obscure the ‘truth’. And this, Bart Kosko (1994) would suggest, is a mismatch problem. While scientists see their art in terms of black and white, computer programmers in terms of all true and false, this is a rarely afforded luxury, for often in life some things are just grey:
Statements of fact are not all true or all false. Their truth lies between total truth and total falsehood, between 1 and 0. They are not bivalent but multivalent, gray, fuzzy.
