Kit Fine

New York University | NYU · Department of Philosophy

I provide a brief history and some philosophical reflections on the development of the method of abstraction in mathematics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This article is based upon an address I gave to a general audience in 2013, under the auspices of the Humboldt Foundation. It is a familiar thought that mathematics deriv...

The theory of embodiment is used in providing an account of the identity of acts and in providing solutions to various puzzles concerning acts.

This paper establishes a sound and complete semantics for the impure logic of ground. Fine (Review of Symbolic Logic, 5(1), 1–25, 2012a) sets out a system for the pure logic of ground, one in which the formulas between which ground-theoretic claims hold have no internal logical complexity; and it provides a sound and complete semantics for the syst...

Bolzano takes the notion of grounding to be factive , so that grounds and their consequences are always true propositions. But he also acknowledges that we sometimes invoke a non-factive notion of grounding. This paper discusses the two ways in which Bolzano attempts to explain the non-factive notion of grounding in terms of the factive notion and...

The paper sets up a general framework for defining the notion of verisimilitude. Popper’s own account of verisimilitude is then located within this framework; and his account is defended on the grounds that it can be seen to provide a reasonable structural or Pareto criterion, rather than a substantive criterion, of verisimilitude. Some other crite...

I discuss the use Kripke makes of the concept of essence in “Naming and Necessity”.

I provide and defend a hyper-intensional account of verisimilitude within the truthmaker framework.

A chapter for the Handbook on Essence, edited by M. Raven and K. Koslicki. It provides an account of Quine's critique of de re modality, with special emphasis on its relationship to his his empiricism, his tentative endorsement of physical necessity, and the relationship between modality and essence.

We provide a semantics and proof of completeness for the impure logic of ground

Prior to Kripke's seminal work on the semantics of modal logic, McKinsey offered an alternative interpretation of the necessity operator, inspired by the Bolzano-Tarski notion of logical truth. According to this interpretation, 'it is necessary that A' is true just in case every sentence with the same logical form as A is true. In our paper, we inv...

Please keep the original abstract. A number of philosophers have flirted with the idea of impossible worlds and some have even become enamored of it. But it has not met with the same degree of acceptance as the more familiar idea of a possible world. Whereas possible worlds have played a broad role in specifying the semantics for natural language a...

This paper is an attempt to apply the truthmaker approach, recently developed by a number of authors, to the problem of providing an adequate formulation of the is–ought gap. I begin by setting up the problem and criticizing some other accounts of how the problem should be stated; I then introduce the basic apparatus of truth-making and show how it...

I provide an account ofsocial groups within the theory of embodiment and, within this context, discuss some of the peculiar problems to which their identity gives rise.

Kathrin Koslicki’s chapter is a wonderfully bold and innovative attack on the question of crossworld-identity: Quine thought Aristotelian essentialism was the problem; and she takes Aristotelian hylomorphism to be the solution. Let me begin with a small point. Koslicki takes a criterion of crossworld identity to be a criterion for when an entity y....

I should begin with an apology. In my paper “Necessity and Non-existence” (NN), I made no reference to the importantly related work of Prior in appendix C of Prior 1957 and to the importantly related work of Steven Kuhn in his superb thesis (Kuhn ...

Joseph Almog’s chapter is a daring and dazzling investigation into the nature of the universe, situated within the grand tradition of absolutist metaphysics, but motivated more by the comparison of the absolute with the set-theoretic universe than with God. It is impossible for me to deal adequately with the deep and difficult issues which his chap...

I apply my “global” theory of vagueness to the question of vague identity. I consider, in particular, the application of the theory to the case of fission and attempt to show that the theory is able to preserve the connection between identity and what matters and between identity and psychological continuity.

Graeme Forbes is well known for his advocacy of a degree-theoretic approach to vagueness, especially in application to questions of identity; and I am grateful to him for casting his expert and critical eye over my own, very different, approach. He raises a number of interesting objections in his chapter. But because of lack of space, I wish to foc...

Gabriel Sandu has made important contributions to the development of independence-friendly logic and I am grateful to him for his searching and sympathetic critique of my own work on arbitrary objects in relation both to independence friendly logic and to other treatments of quantificational and anaphoric dependence....

Gideon Rosen supports the central theses of “Varieties of Necessity” (VN) concerning the distinction between metaphysical and normative necessity and the proper formulation of moral supervenience; and he takes the defense of these theses much further than I did in my own paper and makes the case for them especially vivid and compelling. I was espec...

Percival is interested in what Kierland and Monton (2007: 487) call the “Reality Principle”: (RP) Reality consists, and only consists, in things and how things are. He is interested in two different ways in which the all-encompassing conception of reality suggested by this principle may be challenged. We may, on the one hand, wish to restrict reali...

Jessica Wilson’s paper is a wonderfully sympathetic account of my general approach to metaphysics; and there is a special satisfaction to be had in being, not merely understood, but understood so well. I particularly appreciated her closing remarks to the effect that ‘first-order investigations [in metaphysics] are often characterized by stolid, ev...

Scott Shalkowski and I share a distaste for the ontological extravagance of modal realism and it is a delight to read him write with such eloquence and passion on the need for “sober metaphysics.” However, there is a point on which we appear to disagree and this has to do with the formulation and defense of nominalism; and it will perhaps help to i...

I have long admired Friederike Moltmann’s work at the intersection of linguistics and philosophy; and I have always been especially impressed by the way in which she has attempted to break free of the stranglehold of the possible worlds approach by showing how the diversified ontology of objects commonly associated with traditional metaphysics prov...

I have long admired Fabrice Correia’s work on the conceptual foundations of metaphysics and his present chapter is a characteristically judicious and original contribution to the subject. He is principally concerned with certain reductive theses that I propounded in “Essence and Modality” (EM; 1994). These are that a metaphysical necessity is a pro...

Gary Ostertag’s chapter is an intriguing and probing investigation into the concept of coordination, or de jure co-reference, in which he is concerned not only to criticize the views on coordination which I presented in “Semantic Relationism” (SR) but also to develop a view of his own, one in which coordination is not a feature of what we say, but...

Penelope Mackie’s chapter raises a serious challenge to the essentialist account of modality. According to this account, the necessity of S is a matter of its being essential to some F’s that S be the case. Thus, under a familiar notation, the advocate of such an account will accept, for any sentence S, the equivalence:...

There is a great deal in Hale’s chapter which I admire and with which I agree. In particular, I would go along with him in drawing a distinction between the syntactic and semantic de re , in finding no reasonable basis for modality de re within a linguistic conception of modality, and in diagnosing where Quines’s argument (or what I would call his...

Kroon and McKeown-Green’s (K/M) chapter is a careful and thoughtful discussion of my views on a number of issues concerning the nature of ontology. These include: the connection between what I say on the topic in three different, though related, papers—“What is Metaphysics?” (WM), “The Question of Ontology” (QO), and “The Question of Realism” (QR);...

We previously stated an impossibility result and suggested that the standard approaches to vagueness were incapable of providing a satisfactory response to the result. This chapter considers how a more satisfactory response to the result might proceed. This will call for a radical revision in our general understanding of vagueness and in how its lo...

The theory outlined in Chapter 2 is applied to three problems: the sorites puzzle; the Luminosity of mental states; and personal identity in the face of fission. We attempt to solve the sorites puzzle by distinguishing the principle of Tolerance from the Cut-Off principle and we argue that the plausibility of the sorites argument arises from a sort...

The book is about the problem of vagueness. It begins by discussing some of the existing views on vagueness and then explains why they have not been thought to be satisfactory. It then outlines a new account of vagueness, based on the general idea that vagueness is a global rather than a local phenomenon. In other words, the vagueness of an express...

This chapter introduces the philosophical concept of vagueness and explains its significance for contemporary philosophy. The concept is seen to give rise to two main problems: the ‘soritic problem’ of finding a solution to the paradoxes of vagueness; and the ‘semantic problem’ of finding a satisfactory semantics and logic for vague language. It di...

This paper provides a formal account of non-circular reasoning, i.e. of reasoning in which the conclusion of an argument is not somehow presupposed in its premises. Martin (along with R. Meyer) had previously shown that the implicational system P-W does not contain as theorems any circularities of the form A -> A and this result is then extended to...

An introduction to 'Essence and Existence', a collection of posthumous papers of Bob Hale to be published by OUP (ed. J. Leech), discussing truthmaker semantics for quantificational and modal statements.

I apply the theory of embodiment to various questions concerning the identity of social groups.

A survey article on the connection between ground and truthmaker semantics for the Routledge Handbook on ground (ed. M. Raven).

I argue that there are three basic kinds of necessity, metaphysical, natural and normative, none reducible to the others.

I propose a non-inferential version of Chisholm's puzzle concerning contrary-to-duty obligation and consider its relationship to the inferential version.

I investigage various modal systems containing numerical modalities and propositional quantifiers.

I discuss Yablo’s approach to truthmaker semantics and compare it with my own, with special focus on the idea of a proposition being true of or being restricted to some subject-matter, the idea of propositional containment, and the development of an ‘incremental’ semantics for the conditional. I conclude with some remarks on the relationship betwee...

I extend the previously given truth-maker semantics and logic for imperatives to deontic statements.

I develop a semantics for imperatives within the truthmaker framework by taking the meaning of an imperative to be given by the actions that are in compliance with or in contravention to the imperative.

I discuss the question of when knowledge of higher order ignorance is possible and show in particular that, under quite plausible assumptions, knowledge of second order ignorance is impossible.

An exact truthmaker for A is a state which, as well as guaranteeing A's truth, is wholly relevant to it. States with parts irrelevant to whether A is true do not count as exact truthmakers for A. Giving semantics in this way produces a very unusual consequence relation, on which conjunctions do not entail their conjuncts. This feature makes the res...

I develop a basic theory of content within the framework of truthmaker semantics and, in the second part, consider some of the applications to subject matter, common content, logical subtraction and ground.

This chapter explains the basic framework of truthmaker or 'exact' semantics, an approach to semantics that has recently received a growing amount of interest, and discusses a number of different applications within philosophy and linguistics. The idea of truthmaking is the idea of something on the side of the world - a fact, perhaps, or a state of...

I attempt to meet some criticisms that Williamson makes of my attempt to carry out Prior's project of reducing possibility discourse to actualist discourse.

I provide a truthmaker semantics for Angell’s system of analytic implication and establish completeness.

I argue in favor of a distinctive generic form of essence and ground and show how the two notions thereby complement one another as forms of necessary and sufficient condition.

I propose formulating identity criteria as generic statements of ground, thereby avoiding objections that have been made to the more usual formulations.

I attempt to argue that if statements of permission are to serve as a guide to action then no possible worlds account of their truth-conditions can be correct.

SegerbergKrister. Decidability of S4.1. Theoria (Lund), vol. 34 (1968), pp. 7–20. - Volume 39 Issue 3 - Kit Fine

I compare Ted Sider's views on fundamentality with my own.

It is shown that certain natural constraints trivialize the concept of partial content and it is suggested, in the light of this difficulty, that the principle that partial content is preserved under the substitution of logical equivalents should be given up.

I propose a new semantics for intuitionistic logic, which is a cross between the construction-oriented semantics of Brouwer-Heyting-Kolmogorov and the condition-oriented semantics of Kripke. The new semantics shows how there might be a common semantical underpinning for intuitionistic and classical logic and how intuitionistic logic might thereby b...

I present a puzzle concerning counterfactual reasoning and argue that it should be solved by giving up the principle of substitution for logical equivalents.

Mathematics has been the most successful and is the most mature of the sciences. Its first great master work – Euclid's ‘Elements’ – which helped to establish the field and demonstrate the power of its methods, was written about 2400 years ago; and it served as a standard text in the mathematics curriculum well into the twentieth century. By contra...

I lay down a system of structural rules for various notions of ground and establish soundness and completeness.

I develop a truthmaker semantics for counterfactuals.

There are, I believe, five main features that serve to distinguish traditional metaphysics from other forms of enquiry. These are: the aprioricity of its methods; the generality of its subject-matter; the transparency or ‘non-opacity’ of its concepts; its eidicity or concern with the nature of things; and its role as a foundation for what there is....

Towards the end of Theta.4 of the Metaphysics, Aristotle appears to endorse the obviously invalid modal principle that the truth of A will entail the truth of B if the possibility of A entails the possibility of B. I attempt to show how Aristotle's endorsement of the principle can be seen to arise from his accepting a non-standard interpretation of...

The philosophy of modality investigates necessity and possibility, and related notions — are they objective features of mind-independent reality? If so, are they irreducible, or can modal facts be explained in other terms? This book presents new work on modality by established leaders in the field and by up-and-coming philosophers. Between them, th...

I describe some paradoxes of ground and relate them to the semantic paradoxes.

Logicians and philosophers generally suppose that we now possess a perfectly good understanding of how variables work in the symbolism of logic and mathematics. Given Frege's account of their syntactic role and Tarski's account of their semantic role, it would appear that nothing more of any significance need be said. However, this common view is m...

Are there, in addition to the various actual objects that make up the world, various possible objects? Are there merely possible people, for example, or merely possible electrons, or even merely possible kinds? In the semantics for modal logic we presuppose an ontology of possibilia twice over. For first, we countenance various possible worlds, in...

I present a new approach to the logic and semantics of vagueness.

How can a statue and a piece of alloy be coincident at any time at which they exist and yet differ in their modal properties? I argue that this question demands an answer and that the only plausible answer is one that posits a difference in the form of the two objects.

I investigate the properties of various systems of propositional modal logic with propositional quantifiers.

I provide an example of a model containing S4 which is not complete for the standard relational semantics for propositional modal logic.

I construct an ascending chain of logics containing S4.

Introducing a new and ambitious position in the field, Kit Fine's Semantic Relationism is a major contribution to the philosophy of language. Written by one of today's most respected philosophers Argues for a fundamentally new approach to the study of representation in language and thought Proposes that there may be representational relationships b...

One-way CoordinationIndexicalsTypes, Tokens, and OccurrencesComplex ExpressionsEmpty NamesSemantics as ReflexiveSemantics as the Product of StipulationMates' PuzzleMoore's Paradox of Analysis

Half TitleTitleCopyrightContentsPreface

Frege's PuzzleRejecting CompositionalitySemantic FactClosureReferentialism ReconsideredA Relational Semantics for NamesTransparency

Intentional CoordinationStrict Co-representationThe Content of ThoughtThe Cognitive Puzzle

Kripke's PuzzleSome Related PuzzlesA ResponseA SolutionA Deeper PuzzleA Deeper SolutionThe Role of Variables in Belief ReportsSome Semantical Morals

In [I], Harrop asked whether there were logics containing the intuitionistic logic IL which lack the finite model property. Jankov gave examples of such logics, but they were not finitely axiomatizable. By the Tarski-McKinsey translation, Harrop's problem relates to the question of whether there exist extensions of the modal logic S4 without fmp. M...

I defend my paper ‘The Non-identity of a Material Thing and Its Matter’ against objections from Bryan Frances and Jeffrey King.