Fusion of Symbolic and Quantitative Processing by Conceptual Fuzzy Sets

The real world consists of events and continuous numeric values, while people represent and process their knowledge in terms of symbols. Fuzzy sets provide a strong notation connecting the symbolic representation to the real world. In this paper, we discuss Conceptual Fuzzy Sets (CFS), a new type of fuzzy sets which conform to Wittgenstein’s ideas[7]. In CFS the meaning of a concept is represented by the distribution of activation of labels in associative memory, and is capable of simultaneous symbolic and quantitative processing. In particular, a multi-layered structured CFS represents the meaning of the same concept as it is used in various expressions in each layer. As the propagation of activations corresponds to reasoning, multi-layered reasoning in CFS has following features; 1) capable of simultaneous top-down and bottom-up processing, 2) capable of context sensitive knowledge processing.