Combination of paradoxal sources of information in the neutrosophic framework
by
Jean Dezert
Onera, France

The recent emergence of Smarandache's logic as foundations for a new general unifying theory for uncertain reasoning is becoming both a new philosophical and mathematical research field and could modify deeply our perception and understanding of our outer and inner worlds in coming year. The ability for neutrosophy to include all existing logics as special cases is undoubtedly appealing. Beside of all potential advantages of neutrosophy to handle antinomies and uncertainties, the current mathematical neutrosophic theory (still under development), presents however some weaknesses for solving practical problems. Up to now, to the knowledge of the author, the neutrosophic logic can't deal with combination of bodies of evidence even for very simple fusion or inference problems. This paper is the first attempt to draw a new basis for the combination of sources of information in the neutrosophic framework. More precisely, we present a new rule of combination of independent bodies of evidence which could appear as paradoxal. This rule follows and extends in some sense the Dempster-Shafer rule of combination in a more general framework where both conjunctions and disjunctions of assertions are explicitly taking into account in the fusion process. Limitations and relationships of this new general an practical rule of combination within neutrosophic logic are also discussed in order to present the important theoretical challenges involved in the current development of the neutrosophy.

Date received: November 30, 2001