Supervaluationism - Philosophical Concept | Alexandria
Supervaluationism, a theory in logic and philosophy of language, seeks to provide a semantics for vague terms and statements where truth admits of borderline cases. It proposes that a statement is super-true if it's true under all precisifications (ways of making vague terms precise), super-false if false under all precisifications, and indeterminate otherwise. Often considered a rival to other vagueness solutions like fuzzy logic and epistemicism, supervaluationism offers a classical logic framework for dealing with imprecision, though misconceptions often arise regarding its adherence to bivalence within individual precisifications.
While the formal articulation of supervaluationism is relatively recent, its roots can be traced back to discussions surrounding vagueness in ancient philosophy, notably Aristotle's reflections in Categories and Metaphysics on the sorites paradox – the paradox of the heap. Though not explicitly labeled as such, these early explorations grapple with similar concerns about the limitations of sharp boundaries in defining concepts. The modern formulation, however, truly began to emerge in the latter half of the 20th century, with key developments driven by researchers working to resolve the challenge of statements that seem neither definitively true nor false.
The formal development of supervaluationism is largely attributed to Bas van Fraassen's work on presuppositions in the late 1960s and Kit Fine's application of the framework to vagueness in his 1975 paper "Vagueness, Truth and Logic". Fine argued that supervaluationism could account for the intuition that vague statements lack determinate truth values while preserving classical logical laws. Other influential figures include Richmond Thomason. Since then, the theory has been applied to various linguistic phenomena beyond simple vagueness, including future contingents and semantic paradoxes. Its ability to maintain classical logic while allegedly accommodating indeterminacy has made it a subject of ongoing debate.
Today, supervaluationism continues to spark philosophical discussion and is used in formal semantics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Its conceptual framework can be found even in debates about legal interpretation, where the boundaries of law are often fuzzy. Whether supervaluationism genuinely solves the problems posed by vagueness, or merely masks them with complexity, remains an open question – one that encourages ongoing exploration into our understanding of language and reality.