Human-Inspired—Zadeh—Sets and Logic
Jerry M. Mendel · 2020
In 2015 fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic celebrated their golden anniversary, but (arguably) unfortunately they have not been and are not being used or considered by most technical people outside of the fuzzy community. I believe that this is, arguably, to a large extent due to the negative connotation of the name fuzzy and believe that it is time for a replacement of that word. Fuzzy may be okay to describe a soft teddy bear, a cuddly pet, or a peach but for it to be used for mathematics and its applications is a red flag. In this article I propose Zadeh set/logic as replacements of Fuzzy set/logic. After 55 years, it is time to honor Prof. Zadeh by using his name as a proper adjective. Replacing fuzzy by Zadeh is universal in that it needs no translation in any language, whereas fuzzy does. This article also illustrates how the use of these replacement terms will provide everyone with a way to describe what they are working on when they are in different situations, without encountering the derision or worse that frequently occurs when fuzzy is used.