In logic, a three-valued logic (also trinary logic, trivalent, ternary, or trilean, sometimes abbreviated 3VL) is any of several many-valued logic systems in which there are three truth values indicating true, false, and some third value. This is contrasted with the more commonly known bivalent logics (such as classical sentential or Boolean logic) which provide only for true and false.

Emil Leon Post is credited with first introducing additional logical truth degrees in his 1921 theory of elementary propositions. The conceptual form and basic ideas of three-valued logic were initially published by Jan Łukasiewicz and Clarence Irving Lewis. These were then re-formulated by Grigore Constantin Moisil in an axiomatic algebraic form, and also extended to n-valued logics in 1945.

Around 1910, Charles Sanders Peirce defined a many-valued logic system. He never published it. In fact, he did not even number the three pages of notes where he defined his three-valued operators. Peirce soundly rejected the idea all propositions must be either true or false; boundary-propositions, he writes, are "at the limit between P and not P." However, as confident as he was that "Triadic Logic is universally true," he also jotted down that "All this is mighty close to nonsense." Only in 1966, when Max Fisch and Atwell Turquette began publishing what they rediscovered in his unpublished manuscripts, did Peirce's triadic ideas become widely known.

Broadly speaking, the primary motivation for research of three-valued logic is to represent the truth value of a statement that cannot be represented as true or false. Łukasiewicz initially developed three-valued logic for the problem of future contingents to represent the truth value of statements about the undetermined future. Bruno de Finetti used a third value to represent when "a given individual does not know the [correct] response, at least at a given moment." Hilary Putnam used it to represent values that cannot physically be decided:

For example, if we have verified (by using a speedometer) that the velocity of a motor car is such and such, it might be impossible in such a world to verify or falsify certain statements concerning its position at that moment. If we know by reference to a physical law together with certain observational data that a statement as to the position of a motor car can never be falsified or verified, then there may be some point to not regarding the statement as true or false, but regarding it as "middle". It is only because, in macrocosmic experience, everything that we regard as an empirically meaningful statement seems to be at least potentially verifiable or falsifiable that we prefer the convention according to which we say that every such statement is either true or false, but in many cases we don't know which.

Similarly, Stephen Cole Kleene used a third value to represent predicates that are "undecidable by [any] algorithms whether true or false"

As with bivalent logic, truth values in ternary logic may be represented numerically using various representations of the ternary numeral system. A few of the more common examples are:

Inside a ternary computer, ternary values are represented by ternary signals.