Fuzzy sets

As the contributions to this section of HSM are not very numerous I have found it necessary to generate some news of my own. Besides informing you about coming events, I will also put forward some concerns regarding present attitudes towards the theory of fuzzy sets and its applicability III management-oriented fields of research. Let us take as 'management-oriented fields of research' those labeled as behavioral science, cybernetics, decision theory, human systems management, management science, MCDM, operational research, probability theory, general systems research, utility theory what a variety of scientific endeavours aimed at functions any normally gifted and/or successful manager describes as mostly based on intuition, personality, experience and common sense. Into this jungle entered the theory of fuzzy sets in the early 70s with the fairly modest claim to be a way for handling imprecision, because it also claimed probability theory is no good for that purpose (see Bellman-Zadeh [3, B-141]):