Background
Hintikka, Jaakko was born on January 12, 1929 in Helsingin pitäjä, Finland. Son of Toivo Juho and Lempi J. (Salmi) Hintikka.
(The leisure to do the thinking whose results are gathered...)
The leisure to do the thinking whose results are gathered here has largely been provided by the Academy of Finland, whose support has also made possible the help and co-operation of a group of younger logicians and philosophers. Less tangible support and help is unfortunately harder to record and to thank for. Once again, in working on the many themes I have tried to weave together in this book I have incurred more intellectual and moral debts I can in so many words acknowledge here. Let me only say that the closer to home I get the greater they become. I have especially in mind my colleagues and students at Stanford; my colleagues in Helsinki; the past and present members of my research group in Helsinki; and incom parably more than anybody else my wife Soili. Helsinki, April 1975 JAAKKO HINTIKKA INTRODUCTION A literal-minded reader might easily object to the (sub)title of this volume. What is to be found here, he might allege, are neither models, nor modalities stricto sensu, nor yet any completely new applications of modal logic. Even though the purpose of the title is only to signal the con tinuity between the present volume and its predecessor, Models for Modalities (D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, 1969), the objection is sufficiently well taken to serve as an excuse for an attempt to put my enterprise in a wider perspective.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9027706344/?tag=2022091-20
(One can distinguish, roughly speaking, two different appr...)
One can distinguish, roughly speaking, two different approaches to the philosophy of mathematics. On the one hand, some philosophers (and some mathematicians) take the nature and the results of mathematicians' activities as given, and go on to ask what philosophical morals one might perhaps find in their story. On the other hand, some philosophers, logicians and mathematicians have tried or are trying to subject the very concepts which mathematicians are using in their work to critical scrutiny. In practice this usually means scrutinizing the logical and linguistic tools mathematicians wield. Such scrutiny can scarcely help relying on philosophical ideas and principles. In other words it can scarcely help being literally a study of language, truth and logic in mathematics, albeit not necessarily in the spirit of AJ. Ayer. As its title indicates, the essays included in the present volume represent the latter approach. In most of them one of the fundamental concepts in the foundations of mathematics and logic is subjected to a scrutiny from a largely novel point of view. Typically, it turns out that the concept in question is in need of a revision or reconsideration or at least can be given a new twist. The results of such a re-examination are not primarily critical, however, but typically open up new constructive possibilities. The consequences of such deconstructions and reconstructions are often quite sweeping, and are explored in the same paper or in others.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9048149231/?tag=2022091-20
(A word of warning concerning the aims of this volume is i...)
A word of warning concerning the aims of this volume is in order. Other wise some readers might be unpleasantly surprised by the fact that two of the chapters of an ostensibly historical book are largely topical rather than historical. They are Chapters 7 and 9, respectively entitled 'Are Logical Truths Analytic?' and 'A Priori Truths and Things-In-Them selves'. Moreover, the history dealt with in Chapter 11 is so recent as to have more critical than antiquarian interest. This mixture of materials may seem all the more surprising as I shall myself criticize (in Chapter I) too facile assimilations of earlier thinkers' concepts and problems to later ones. There is no inconsistency here, it seems to me. The aims of the present volume are historical, and for that very purpose, for the purpose of understanding and evaluating earlier thinkers it is vital to know the conceptual landscape in which they were moving. A crude analogy may be helpful here. No military historian can afford to neglect the topo graphy of the battles he is studying. If he does not know in some detail what kind of pass Thermopylae is or on what sort of ridge the battle of Bussaco was fought, he has no business of discussing these battles, even if this topographical information alone does not yet amount to historical knowledge.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9027704554/?tag=2022091-20
(The papers collected in this volume were written over a p...)
The papers collected in this volume were written over a period of some eight or nine years, with some still earlier material incorporated in one of them. Publishing them under the same cover does not make a con tinuous book of them. The papers are thematically connected with each other, however, in a way which has led me to think that they can naturally be grouped together. In any list of philosophically important concepts, those falling within the range of application of modal logic will rank high in interest. They include necessity, possibility, obligation, permission, knowledge, belief, perception, memory, hoping, and striving, to mention just a few of the more obvious ones. When a satisfactory semantics (in the sense of Tarski and Carnap) was first developed for modal logic, a fascinating new set of methods and ideas was thus made available for philosophical studies. The pioneers of this model theory of modality include prominently Stig Kanger and Saul Kripke. Several others were working in the same area independently and more or less concurrently. Some of the older papers in this collection, especially 'Quantification and Modality' and 'Modes of Modality', serve to clarify some of the main possibilities in the semantics of modal logics in general.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9027700788/?tag=2022091-20
(In this book the authors propose to apply ideas from rece...)
In this book the authors propose to apply ideas from recent philosophy of science, especially Hintikka's "interrogative model of inquiry", to linguistic theorizing. Using the phenomena of co-reference as a testing ground, they examine how Hintikka's game-theoretical semantics (GTS) and Chomsky's government and binding theory (GB) account for the co-reference relations that hold in simple sample sentences. This produces interesting areas of divergence between the two theories. The general conclusion to emerge from this comparison is the difficulty of dealing with co-reference phenomena in any syntax-oriented theory. By systematically varying certain instructive examples, the authors uncover telling evidence against any syntax-based account of co-reference phenomena in English. In the concluding chapter of the book, evidence is similarly produced against any syntactical explanation of reflexivization in English. In each of the cases analyzed GTS readily accounts for the phenomena discussed.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0631177175/?tag=2022091-20
(IF WITI'GENSTEIN COULD TALK, COULD WE UNDERSTAND HIM? Per...)
IF WITI'GENSTEIN COULD TALK, COULD WE UNDERSTAND HIM? Perusing the secondary literature on Wittgenstein, I have frequently experienced a perfect Brechtean Entfremdungseffekt. This is interesting, I have felt like saying when reading books and papers on Wittgenstein, but who is the writer talking about? Certainly not Ludwig Wittgenstein the actual person who wrote his books and notebooks and whom I happened to meet. Why is there this strange gap between the ideas of the actual philosopher and the musings of his interpreters? Wittgenstein is talking to us through the posthumous publication of his writings. Why don't philosophers understand what he is saying? A partial reason is outlined in the first essay of this volume. Wittgenstein was far too impatient to explain in his books and book drafts what his problems were, what it was that he was trying to get clear about. He was even too impatient to explain in full his earlier solutions, often merely referring to them casually as it were in a shorthand notation. For one important instance, in The Brown Book, Wittgenstein had explained in some detail what name-object relationships amount to in his view. There he offers both an explanation of what his problem is and an account of his own view illustrated by means of specific examples of language-games. But when he raises the same question again in Philosophical Investigations I, sec.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0792342801/?tag=2022091-20
(Several of the basic ideas of current language theory are...)
Several of the basic ideas of current language theory are subjected to critical scrutiny and found wanting, including the concept of scope, the hegemony of generative syntax, the Frege-Russell claim that verbs like 'is' are ambiguous, and the assumptions underlying the so-called New Theory of Reference. In their stead, new constructive ideas are proposed.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0792347803/?tag=2022091-20
(somewhat like Henkin's nonstandard interpretation of high...)
somewhat like Henkin's nonstandard interpretation of higher-order logics, while the right semantics or logical modalities is an analogue to the standard of type theory in Henkin's sense. interpretation Another possibility would be to follow W.V. Quine's advice to give up logi- cal modalities as being beyond repair. Or we could also try to develop a logic of conceptual possibility, restricting the range of our "possible worlds" to those compatible with the transcendental presuppositions of our own conceptual sys- tem. This looks in fact like one of the most interesting possible theories I have dreamt of developing but undoubtedly never will. Its kinship with Kant's way of thinking should be obvious. Besides putting the entire enterprise of possible-worlds semantics into a perspective, we can also see that the actual history of possible-worlds seman- tics is more complicated than it might first appear to be. For the standard in- terpretation of modal logics has reared its beautiful head repeatedly in the writings of Stig Kanger, Richard Montague the pre-Montague-semantics theorist, and Nino Cocchiarella.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0792300416/?tag=2022091-20
(The papers collected in this volume were written over a p...)
The papers collected in this volume were written over a period of some eight or nine years, with some still earlier material incorporated in one of them. Publishing them under the same cover does not make a con tinuous book of them. The papers are thematically connected with each other, however, in a way which has led me to think that they can naturally be grouped together. In any list of philosophically important concepts, those falling within the range of application of modal logic will rank high in interest. They include necessity, possibility, obligation, permission, knowledge, belief, perception, memory, hoping, and striving, to mention just a few of the more obvious ones. When a satisfactory semantics (in the sense of Tarski and Carnap) was first developed for modal logic, a fascinating new set of methods and ideas was thus made available for philosophical studies. The pioneers of this model theory of modality include prominently Stig Kanger and Saul Kripke. Several others were working in the same area independently and more or less concurrently. Some of the older papers in this collection, especially 'Quantification and Modality' and 'Modes of Modality', serve to clarify some of the main possibilities in the semantics of modal logics in general.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9027705984/?tag=2022091-20
(I n order to appreciate properly what we are doing in thi...)
I n order to appreciate properly what we are doing in this book it is necessary to realize that our approach to linguistic theorizing differs from the prevailing views. Our approach can be described by indicating what distinguishes it from the methodological ideas current in theoretical linguistics, which I consider seriously misguided. Linguists typically construe their task in these days as that of making exceptionless generalizations from particular examples. This explanatory strategy is wrong in several different ways. It presupposes that we can have "intuitions" about particular examples, usually examples invented by the linguist himself or herself, reliable and sharp enough to serve as a basis of sharp generalizations. It also presupposes that we cannot have equally reliable direct access to general linguistic regularities. Both assumptions appear to me extremely dubious, and the first of them has in effect been challenged by linguists like Dwight Bol inger. There is also some evidence that the degree of unanimity among linguists is fairly low when it comes to less clear cases, even in connection with such relatively simple questions as grammaticality (acceptability). For this reason we have tried to rely more on quotations from contemporary fiction, newspapers and magazines than on linguists' and philosophers' ad hoc examples. I also find it strange that some of the same linguists as believe that we all possess innate ideas about general characteristics of humanly possible grammars assume that we can have access to them only via their particular consequences.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9027720568/?tag=2022091-20
(IF WITI'GENSTEIN COULD TALK, COULD WE UNDERSTAND HIM? Per...)
IF WITI'GENSTEIN COULD TALK, COULD WE UNDERSTAND HIM? Perusing the secondary literature on Wittgenstein, I have frequently experienced a perfect Brechtean Entfremdungseffekt. This is interesting, I have felt like saying when reading books and papers on Wittgenstein, but who is the writer talking about? Certainly not Ludwig Wittgenstein the actual person who wrote his books and notebooks and whom I happened to meet. Why is there this strange gap between the ideas of the actual philosopher and the musings of his interpreters? Wittgenstein is talking to us through the posthumous publication of his writings. Why don't philosophers understand what he is saying? A partial reason is outlined in the first essay of this volume. Wittgenstein was far too impatient to explain in his books and book drafts what his problems were, what it was that he was trying to get clear about. He was even too impatient to explain in full his earlier solutions, often merely referring to them casually as it were in a shorthand notation. For one important instance, in The Brown Book, Wittgenstein had explained in some detail what name-object relationships amount to in his view. There he offers both an explanation of what his problem is and an account of his own view illustrated by means of specific examples of language-games. But when he raises the same question again in Philosophical Investigations I, sec.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0792340914/?tag=2022091-20
(A revolutioinary interpretation of the work of Ludwig Wit...)
A revolutioinary interpretation of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book presents an analysis of his early work in the "Tractatus" and its gradual transformation in the later philosophy of the "Investigations". The authors propose a radical interpretation of the "Tractatus" and argue that the objects of the "Tractatus" are but Russellian objects of acquaintance in disguise. Thus in the "Tractatus" Wittgenstein regarded phenomenological language as logically correct. However, in 1929, according to the authors, he abandoned the phenomenological conception of language in favour of a physicalist one and it is within this new framework that the "Philosophical Investigations" can be most fruitfully understood.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0631141812/?tag=2022091-20
(Most current work in epistemology deals with the evaluati...)
Most current work in epistemology deals with the evaluation and justification of information already acquired. In this book, Jaakko Hintikka instead discusses the more important problem of how knowledge is acquired in the first place. His model of information-seeking is the old Socratic method of questioning, which has been generalized and brought up-to-date through the logical theory of questions and answers that he has developed.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521616514/?tag=2022091-20
(This book, written by one of philosophy's preeminent logi...)
This book, written by one of philosophy's preeminent logicians, argues that many of the basic assumptions common to logic, philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics are in need of change. Jaakko Hintikka proposes a new basic first-order logic and uses it to explore the foundations of mathematics. This new logic enables logicians to express on the first-order level such concepts as equicardinality, infinity, and truth in the same language. Hintikka's new logic is highly original and will prove appealing to logicians, philosophers of mathematics, and mathematicians concerned with the foundations of the discipline.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521624983/?tag=2022091-20
(One can distinguish, roughly speaking, two different appr...)
One can distinguish, roughly speaking, two different approaches to the philosophy of mathematics. On the one hand, some philosophers (and some mathematicians) take the nature and the results of mathematicians' activities as given, and go on to ask what philosophical morals one might perhaps find in their story. On the other hand, some philosophers, logicians and mathematicians have tried or are trying to subject the very concepts which mathematicians are using in their work to critical scrutiny. In practice this usually means scrutinizing the logical and linguistic tools mathematicians wield. Such scrutiny can scarcely help relying on philosophical ideas and principles. In other words it can scarcely help being literally a study of language, truth and logic in mathematics, albeit not necessarily in the spirit of AJ. Ayer. As its title indicates, the essays included in the present volume represent the latter approach. In most of them one of the fundamental concepts in the foundations of mathematics and logic is subjected to a scrutiny from a largely novel point of view. Typically, it turns out that the concept in question is in need of a revision or reconsideration or at least can be given a new twist. The results of such a re-examination are not primarily critical, however, but typically open up new constructive possibilities. The consequences of such deconstructions and reconstructions are often quite sweeping, and are explored in the same paper or in others.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0792347668/?tag=2022091-20
Hintikka, Jaakko was born on January 12, 1929 in Helsingin pitäjä, Finland. Son of Toivo Juho and Lempi J. (Salmi) Hintikka.
Graduate in Philosophy, University Helsinki, Finland, 1952. Doctor of Philosophy, University Helsinki, Finland, 1956. Postgraduate, Harvard University, 1954.
Doctorate (honorary), University Liège, 1984. Doctorate (honorary), Jagiellonian University, 1995. Doctorate (honorary), Uppsala University, 2000.
Doctorate (honorary), University Oulu, 2001. Doctorate (honorary), University Turku, 2003. Doctorate, University Bucarest, 2010.
Junior fellow, Society Fellows, Harvard University, 1956-1959;
professor philosophy, U. Helsinki, 1959-1970;
research professor, Academy Finland, 1970-1981;
professor philosophy, Florida State University, Tallahassee, 1978-1990;
McKenzie professor, Florida State University, Tallahassee, 1986-1990;
also professor computer science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, 1986-1990;
professor, Boston University, since 1990. Visiting professor Brown U., 1962, University of California, Berkeley, 1963, Hebrew U. Jerusalem, 1974. Part-time professor philosophy Stanford University, 1964-1982, ImmanuelKant lecturer, 1985.
John Locke lecturer Oxford (England) University, 1964. FellowCenter for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, 1970-1971. Hägerström lecturer U. Uppsala, 1983.
Co-chair American organizing committee Twentieth World Congress Philosophical, 1998.
(Several of the basic ideas of current language theory are...)
(The leisure to do the thinking whose results are gathered...)
(A revolutioinary interpretation of the work of Ludwig Wit...)
(This book, written by one of philosophy's preeminent logi...)
(somewhat like Henkin's nonstandard interpretation of high...)
(IF WITI'GENSTEIN COULD TALK, COULD WE UNDERSTAND HIM? Per...)
(IF WITI'GENSTEIN COULD TALK, COULD WE UNDERSTAND HIM? Per...)
(I n order to appreciate properly what we are doing in thi...)
(In this book the authors propose to apply ideas from rece...)
(The papers collected in this volume were written over a p...)
(The papers collected in this volume were written over a p...)
(Knowledge and Belief An Introduction to the Logic of the ...)
(Most current work in epistemology deals with the evaluati...)
(One can distinguish, roughly speaking, two different appr...)
(One can distinguish, roughly speaking, two different appr...)
(A word of warning concerning the aims of this volume is i...)
(Polish translation Polskie tlumaczenie)
Member Association Symbolic Logic (vice president 1968-1970), International Institute Philosophy (vice president 1993-1996, president 1999-2002), International Union History and Philosophy Science (vice president 1971-1975, president 1975), Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters (honorary. Council 1972-1979), Philosophy of Science Association (governing board 1970-1972), Societas Scientiarum Fennica, International Federation Philosophical Societies (governing board 1978-1988, 93-98, vice president 1993-1998), American Philosophical Association (vice president Pacific division 1974-1975, president 1975-1976), American Academy Arts and Sciences, Norwegian Academy of Sciences, Christian Science Peirce Society (president 1997), Russian Academy of Sciences (foreign member), Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Phi Beta Kappa (honorary), Norwegian Royal Society Sciences.
Married Merrill Bristow Provence, February 11, 1978 (deceased). Married Ghita Holmström, December 19, 1987.