Fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logics were able to demonstrate impressive achievements in control theory and in technical applications already in the 1970s; but Lotfi Zadeh’s great concern was - and still is - to demonstrate the power of his radically different approach to representing human concepts as a representational foundation in Artificial Intelligence. With his approach of introducing graded compatibility values to describe relations between concepts and real-world entities, formal systems can characterize states of affairs in terms of a manageable number of concepts - much like humans who describe the world by concepts that are qualified through linguistic hedges, prosodic emphasis or attenuation, and many other subtle ways of describing situations in a differentiated way to capture their essential significance in a concise manner.
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