Conceptual fuzzy sets and their connectives

摘要

The evacuation of element pertinence to sets and connecting the sets thenmselves when these are not crisp may cause serious epistemological and practical problems. Fuzzy Set Theory (FST) solved some of these problems, with noticeable success since its inception by Zadeh [40] in the 1960s. But that theory now is meeting with difficulties for penetrating AI or, more generally, Cognitive Science. This is mainly due to the characteristics of the membership (characteristic) function and, by reflection, of the connectives MIN-MAX. According to these operators, set connections are performed by diffusing numerical data, i.e. values of membership degree, rather than qualitative data, such as meaning of the data themselves [42], so that the meaning itself can be taken into considerate. In this paper we present an interpretation of element pertinence to sets which yields a more adequate type of set connectives [3].