Abstract
A fuzzy set is a set with elements whose membership grades can have any real value between 0 and 1. This ’grading capacity’ of fuzzy sets is a major advancement compared to its predecessor ’crisp sets’ which are confined to binary scores (Boolean analysis). It is an advancement because in many cases dichotomies are too unrefined to capture the diversity of most social and political phenomena. Yet, the Aristotelian or crisp-set logic in which cases are perceived of as members (those that certainly belong in the set) and nonmembers (those that certainly do not) is still dominating the literature. The fuzzy-set logic challenges the sacred element of the foundation of science: the Aristotelian two-valued logic. The argument based on the fuzzy-set logic is that it is much more appropriate to conceptualise social and political phenomena as ’sets’ with imprecise boundaries that facilitate gradual transitions from membership to non-membership and vice versa (Klir/Yuan 1995: 4). By assigning partial memberships researchers are able to perform a range of analyses. Examples are the identification of necessary and sufficient causal conditions and a configurational approach of diversity in which cases are viewed in terms of their multiple memberships in sets.
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Pennings, P. (2009). Fuzzy-sets and QCA — The Methodology of the fuzzy-set logic and its application. In: Pickel, S., Pickel, G., Lauth, HJ., Jahn, D. (eds) Methoden der vergleichenden Politik- und Sozialwissenschaft. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-91826-6_17
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