Given a reference set ,
we indicate the elements of
which belong to a certain class of
and those which do not belong to it.
This class is then a subset of with the usual meaning in set theory, and will be qualified as classical or crisp in the following paragraphs.
If the membership of some elements of
to a class is not absolute, we can indicate to which degree each element
belongs to this class. This class is then a fuzzy
subset of .