Abstract Fuzzy set theory has been criticized for building on an ill-understood notion, viz., that of graded membership. To address this concern, recent work has proposed an operational definition of this notion, which experimental studies have subsequently shown to make accurate predictions regarding people's judgments of degrees of membership. It is still an open question whether analogous positive results can be obtained for more complex fuzzy concepts, for instance, concepts that can be modeled as intersections of fuzzy sets. The present paper makes a beginning with answering this question. It reports results of an experimental study that derived degrees of membership for a conjunctive concept from the outcomes of the aforementioned studies and then compared these predicted degrees with the degrees as judged by participants. Degrees of membership were derived using all of the better-known fuzzy intersection operators, and thus the results of the study also shed new light on the question of the empirical adequacy of those operators.

中文翻译：

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模糊概念组合：一项实证研究

摘要 模糊集理论因建立在一个难以理解的概念上而受到批评，即分级隶属关系。为了解决这个问题，最近的工作提出了这个概念的操作定义，随后的实验研究表明，它可以对人们对成员资格程度的判断做出准确的预测。对于更复杂的模糊概念，例如可以建模为模糊集交集的概念，是否可以获得类似的正面结果仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。本文从回答这个问题开始。它报告了一项实验研究的结果，该研究从上述研究的结果中推导出合取概念的隶属度，然后将这些预测的度与参与者判断的度进行比较。