BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

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FUZZY SETS (THEORY of) 2)3)

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L.A. ZADEH writes: "The theory of fuzzy sets is, in effect, a step toward a rapprochement between the precision of classical mathematics and the pervasive imprecision of the real world - a rapprochement born of the incessant human quest for a better understanding of mental processes and cognition…

"We have been slow in coming to the realization that much, perhaps most, of human cognition and interaction with the outside world involves constructs which are not sets in the clasical sense, but rather "fuzzy sets" (or subsets), that is, classes with unsharp boundaries in which the transition from membership to non-membership is gradual rather than abrupt. Indeed it can be argued that much of the logic of human reasoning is not the classical two-valued or even multivalued logic, but a logic with fuzzy truths, fuzzy connectives, and fuzzy rules of inference" (1973a & 1973b, p.28).

"In our view, it is this fuzzy, and as yet not well understood, logic that plays a basic role in what may well be one of the most important facets of human thinking, namely, the ability to summarize information – to extract from the collection of masses of data impinging upon the human brain those and only those subcollections which are relevant to the performance of the task at hand…

"Thus, the ability to manipulate fuzzy sets and the consequent summarizing capability constitute one of the most important assets of the human mind as well as a fundamental characteristic that distinguishes human intelligence from the type of machine intelligence that is embodied in present-day digital computers" (1973b, p.28-29).

Fuzzy sets theory includes fuzzy subsets, fuzzy functions, fuzzy categories, fuzzy topological spaces, fuzzy structures, etc…

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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