The Emergence of Fuzzy Sets: A Historical Perspective

Didier Dubois (1, 2, 3) , Henri Prade (2, 3)

1 QUB - Queen's University [Belfast]
2 IRIT-ADRIA - Argumentation, Décision, Raisonnement, Incertitude et Apprentissage
3 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

This paper tries to suggest some reasons why fuzzy set theory came to life 50 years ago by pointing out the existence of streams of thought in the first half of the XXth century in logic, linguistics and philosophy, that paved the way to the idea of moving away from the Boolean framework, through the proposal of many-valued logics and the study of the vagueness phenomenon in natural languages. The founding paper in fuzzy set theory can be viewed as the crystallization of such ideas inside the engineering arena. Then we stress the point that this publication in 1965 was followed by several other seminal papers in the subsequent 15 years, regarding classification, ordering and similarity, systems science, decision-making, uncertainty management and approximate reasoning. The continued effort by Zadeh to apply fuzzy sets to the basic notions of a number of disciplines in computer and information sciences proved crucial in the diffusion of this concept from mathematical sciences to industrial applications.

Mots clés: Fuzzy sets; Many-valued logics; Vagueness; Possibility theory; Approximate reasoning

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Didier Dubois, Henri Prade. The Emergence of Fuzzy Sets: A Historical Perspective. Kahraman, Cengiz; Kaymak, Uzay; Yazici, Adnan. Fuzzy Logic in Its 50th Year: New Developments, Directions and Challenges., 341, Springer, pp.3--19, 2016, Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing book series (STUDFUZZ), 10.1007/978-3-319-31093-0_1. ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-31093-0_1⟩. ⟨hal-03159066⟩