Arthur Fine

Arthur Fine (born 1937) is an American philosopher of science teaching at the University of Washington (UW). Before moving to UW he taught for many years at Northwestern University and, before that, at Cornell University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a past president of the American Philosophical Association and the Philosophy of Science Association and has for many years been on the editorial board of the journal Philosophy of Science, one of the leading publications in the field. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2014.

Fine famously proposed the natural ontological attitude (NOA) as a resolution to the debates over scientific realism. "NOA is intended to comprise a neutral, common core of realist and antirealist attitudes of acceptance of our best theories. The mistake that both parties make, Fine suggests, is to add further epistemological and metaphysical diagnoses to this shared position, such as pronouncements about which aspects of scientific ontology should be viewed as real, which are proper subjects of belief, and so on."