The perceptron algorithm, which is one of a class of gradient descent techniques, has been widely used in pattern recognition to determine linear decision boundaries. However, it may not give desirable results when pattern sets are nonlinerly separable. A fuzzy version was developed to male up for the weaknesses in the crisp perceptron algorithm. This was achieved by assigning memberships to the pattern sets. However, still another drawback exists in that the pattern memberships do not consider class typicality of the patterns. Therefore, we propose a possibilistic approach to the crisp perceptron algorithm. This algorithm combines the linearly separable property of the crisp version and the convergence property of the fuzzy version. Several examples are given to show the validity of the method.