A qualitative approach to syllogistic reasoning

In this paper we present a new approach to a symbolic treatment of quantified statements having the following form "Q A's are B's", knowing that A and B are labels denoting sets, and Q is a linguistic quantifier interpreted as a proportion evaluated in a qualitative way. Our model can be viewed as a symbolic generalization of statistical conditional probability notions as well as a symbolic generalization of the classical probabilistic operators. Our approach is founded on a symbolic finite M-valued logic in which the graduation scale of M symbolic quantifiers is translated in terms of truth degrees. Moreover, we propose symbolic inference rules allowing us to manage quantified statements.