Thinker · TH-0259
Kit Fine
Kit Fine is a British-born philosopher and logician who has taught at UCLA, the University of Michigan and, since the late 1990s, New York…
b. 1946 · Los Angeles; Ann Arbor, Michigan; New York
Traditions: Analytic
Kit Fine is a British-born philosopher and logician who has taught at UCLA, the University of Michigan and, since the late 1990s, New York University. In "Vagueness, Truth and Logic" (1975) he developed supervaluationism: a vague sentence is true if it comes out true on every admissible way of making its terms precise. He has also done influential work on modal logic, on essence as prior to necessity, and on metaphysical grounding.
Key ideas
- A vague sentence is super-true if true on all admissible precisifications, super-false if false on all, and otherwise neither.
- Supervaluationism keeps classical laws such as excluded middle while allowing truth-value gaps for borderline cases.
- Essence is not reducible to necessity: Socrates is necessarily a member of his singleton set, but this is not part of his essence.
- Some facts hold in virtue of, or are grounded in, more fundamental facts.
Major works
- "Vagueness, Truth and Logic" (1975, Synthese)
- "Essence and Modality" (1994, Philosophical Perspectives)
- Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers (2005)
- Vagueness: A Global Approach (2020)
In the conversation
- Debate The grounding revival brought metaphysics back without bringing back a method
- Reading group Reading group: Kit Fine, ‘Vagueness, Truth and Logic’ (1975)
- Debate Fuzzy logic is good engineering and a poor theory of vagueness
- Debate Metaphysics is about what grounds what, not about what exists
On the map
The questions in The Coordinates of Thought where Kit Fine takes a place.
- 4.4.1 Many-Valued and Fuzzy Logic Can a statement be partly true?