A Conceptual Framework for Understanding a Fuzzy System

The word Interpretability is becoming more and more frequent in the fuzzy literature. It is admitted as the main advantage of fuzzy systems and it should be given a main role in fuzzy modeling. However, although researchers talk a lot about Interpretability, it is even not clear what it really means. Understanding of fuzzy systems is a subjective task which strongly depends on the person (experience, preferences, knowledge, etc.) who makes the assessment. The general context and the specific problem under consideration have a huge influence too. This paper makes a review on works related to Interpretability and presents the proposal of a conceptual framework that can help to understand fuzzy systems. Moreover, it can be considered as a starting point in order to propose a fuzzy index, easily adaptable to the context of each problem as well as to the user quality criteria, for measuring Interpretability.