Abstract
Empirical investigations have shown that instead of strong logical ‘and’ and ‘or’ connectives there is often some degree of compensation in between. In this paper the generalized means are proposed as connective operators for fuzzy set theory which easily allow for modelling the degree of compensation, in a natural manner including the arithmetic and geometric means as well as the maximum and minimum operators as special cases. Numerical examples with empirical data form an illustration of this concept. Some aspects of applications to decision-making are discussed.