On the semantics and the use of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps in social sciences

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) have been around for more than twenty years, but the way how they have been used and the interpretation of their results are nowadays far from their original intended goal. This paper focus on discussing the structure, the semantics and the possible use of FCM as tools to model and simulate complex social, economic and political systems, while clarifying some issues that have been recurrent in published FCM papers.