Jaakko Hintikka
Encyclopedia
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
philosopher and logician.
Hintikka was born in Vantaa
Vantaa
Vantaa is a city and municipality in Finland. Helsinki, Vantaa, Espoo and Kauniainen make up the Helsinki Metropolitan Area.Vantaa, with its population of , is the fourth most populated city of Finland. The biggest airport in Finland, the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport, is located there...
. After teaching for a number of years at Florida State University
Florida State University
The Florida State University is a space-grant and sea-grant public university located in Tallahassee, Florida, United States. It is a comprehensive doctoral research university with medical programs and significant research activity as determined by the Carnegie Foundation...
, Stanford, University of Helsinki
University of Helsinki
The University of Helsinki is a university located in Helsinki, Finland since 1829, but was founded in the city of Turku in 1640 as The Royal Academy of Turku, at that time part of the Swedish Empire. It is the oldest and largest university in Finland with the widest range of disciplines available...
, and the Academy of Finland
Academy of Finland
The Academy of Finland is a governmental funding body for scientific research in Finland. It is based in the Finnish capital, Helsinki. Yearly, the Academy administers over 260 million euros to Finnish research activities. Over 5,000 researchers are working on the projects supported by the academy...
, he is currently Professor of Philosophy at Boston University
Boston University
Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
. The prolific author or co-author of over 30 books and over 300 scholarly articles has contributed to mathematical logic
Mathematical logic
Mathematical logic is a subfield of mathematics with close connections to foundations of mathematics, theoretical computer science and philosophical logic. The field includes both the mathematical study of logic and the applications of formal logic to other areas of mathematics...
, philosophical logic
Philosophical logic
Philosophical logic is a term introduced by Bertrand Russell to represent his idea that the workings of natural language and thought can only be adequately represented by an artificial language; essentially it was his formalization program for the natural language...
, the philosophy of mathematics
Philosophy of mathematics
The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. The aim of the philosophy of mathematics is to provide an account of the nature and methodology of mathematics and to understand the place of...
, epistemology, language theory
Philosophy of language
Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...
, and the philosophy of science
Philosophy of science
The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...
. His works have appeared in over nine languages.
Hintikka is regarded as the founder of formal epistemic logic
Epistemic logic
Epistemic modal logic is a subfield of modal logic that is concerned with reasoning about knowledge. While epistemology has a long philosophical tradition dating back to Ancient Greece, epistemic logic is a much more recent development with applications in many fields, including philosophy,...
and of game semantics
Game semantics
Game semantics is an approach to formal semantics that grounds the concepts of truth or validity on game-theoretic concepts, such as the existence of a winning strategy for a player, somewhat resembling Socratic dialogues or medieval theory of Obligationes. In the late 1950s Paul Lorenzen was the...
for logic. Early in his career, he devised a semantics of modal logic essentially analogous to Kripke's
Saul Kripke
Saul Aaron Kripke is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center...
frame semantics
Kripke semantics
Kripke semantics is a formal semantics for non-classical logic systems created in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Saul Kripke. It was first made for modal logics, and later adapted to intuitionistic logic and other non-classical systems...
, and discovered the now widely taught semantic tableau, independently of Evert Willem Beth
Evert Willem Beth
Evert Willem Beth was a Dutch philosopher and logician, whose work principally concerned the foundations of mathematics.- Biography :...
. In recent decades, he has worked mainly on game semantics
Game semantics
Game semantics is an approach to formal semantics that grounds the concepts of truth or validity on game-theoretic concepts, such as the existence of a winning strategy for a player, somewhat resembling Socratic dialogues or medieval theory of Obligationes. In the late 1950s Paul Lorenzen was the...
, and on independence-friendly logic
Independence-friendly logic
Independence-friendly logic , proposed by Jaakko Hintikka and Gabriel Sandu, aims at being a more natural and intuitive alternative to classical first-order logic . IF logic is characterized by branching quantifiers...
, known for its "branching quantifier
Branching quantifier
In logic a branching quantifier, also called a Henkin quantifier, finite partially ordered quantifier or even nonlinear quantifier, is a partial ordering\langle Qx_1\dots Qx_n\rangle...
s" which he believes do better justice to our intuitions about quantifiers
Quantification
Quantification has several distinct senses. In mathematics and empirical science, it is the act of counting and measuring that maps human sense observations and experiences into members of some set of numbers. Quantification in this sense is fundamental to the scientific method.In logic,...
than does conventional first-order logic
First-order logic
First-order logic is a formal logical system used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. It goes by many names, including: first-order predicate calculus, the lower predicate calculus, quantification theory, and predicate logic...
. He has done important exegetical work on Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...
, Wittgenstein, and C.S. Peirce. Hintikka's work can be seen as a continuation of analytic tendency in philosophy founded by Brentano
Franz Brentano
Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano was an influential German philosopher and psychologist whose influence was felt by other such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Kazimierz Twardowski and Alexius Meinong, who followed and adapted his views.-Life:Brentano was born at Marienberg am...
and Peirce, advanced by Frege and Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
, and continued by Carnap, Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition...
, and by Hintikka's teacher Georg Henrik von Wright
Georg Henrik von Wright
Georg Henrik von Wright was a Finnish philosopher, who succeeded Ludwig Wittgenstein as professor at the University of Cambridge. He published in English, Finnish, German, and in Swedish. Belonging to the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland, von Wright also had Finnish and 17th-century Scottish...
. For instance, in 1998 he wrote The Principles of Mathematics Revisited which takes an exploratory stance comparable to that Russell made with his The Principles of Mathematics
The Principles of Mathematics
The Principles of Mathematics is a book written by Bertrand Russell in 1903. In it he presented his famous paradox and argued his thesis that mathematics and logic are identical....
in 1903.
Hintikka edited the academic journal
Academic journal
An academic journal is a peer-reviewed periodical in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as forums for the introduction and presentation for scrutiny of new research, and the critique of existing research...
Synthese
Synthese
Synthese is a scholarly periodical edited by Johan van Benthem, Vincent F. Hendricks and John Symons specializing in papers in epistemology, methodology and philosophy of science...
from 1962 to 2002, and has been a consultant editor for more than ten journals. He was the first vice-president of the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie
International Federation of Philosophical Societies
The International Federation of Philosophical Societies or Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie is an International Federation of Philosophical Societies, whose member-societies span pretty well every country where there is significant academic philosophy...
, the Vice-President of the Institut International de Philosophie (1993–1996), as well as a member of the American Philosophical Association
American Philosophical Association
The American Philosophical Association is the main professional organization for philosophers in the United States. Founded in 1900, its mission is to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarly activity in philosophy, to facilitate the professional work...
, the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science
International Union of History and Philosophy of Science
The International Union of History and Philosophy of Science is one of the members of the International Council for Science . It was founded in 1955 by merging the International Union of History of Science and the International Union of Philosophy of Science , and consists of two divisions, the...
, Association for Symbolic Logic
Association for Symbolic Logic
The Association for Symbolic Logic is an international organization of specialists in mathematical logic and philosophical logic—the largest such organization in the world. The ASL was founded in 1936, a crucial year in the development of modern logic, and its first president was Alonzo Church...
, and a member of the governing board of the Philosophy of Science Association
Philosophy of Science Association
The Philosophy of Science Association is an academic organization which promotes further studies and free discussion from diverse standpoints in the field of philosophy of science....
. In 2005, he won the Rolf Schock prize in logic and philosophy "for his pioneering contributions to the logical analysis of modal concepts, in particular the concepts of knowledge and belief".
He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters is a learned society based in Oslo, Norway.-History:The University of Oslo was established in 1811. The idea of a learned society in Christiania surfaced for the first time in 1841. The city of Throndhjem had no university, but had a learned...
.
Selected books
For a bibliography, see Auxier and Hahn (2006).- Primary
- Socratic Epistemology; Explorations of Knowledge-Seeking by Questioning ISBN 9780521616515
- The Philosophy of Mathematics ISBN 0-1987-5011-0
- The Principles of Mathematics Revisited ISBN 0-521-62498-3
- Paradigms for Language Theory and Other Essays ISBN 0-7923-4780-3
- Lingua Universalis vs Calculus Ratiocinator ISBN 0-7923-4246-1
- Inquiry as Inquiry: A Logic of Scientific Discovery ISBN 0-7923-5477-X
- Language, Truth and Logic in Mathematics ISBN 0-7923-4766-8
- Ludwig WittgensteinLudwig WittgensteinLudwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
: Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths ISBN 0-7923-4091-4 - Analyses of AristotleAristotleAristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
ISBN 1-4020-2040-6 - The LogicLogicIn philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Logic ISBN 0-7923-0040-8 - Knowledge and Belief - An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions ISBN 1904987087
- Secondary
- Auxier, R.E., and Hahn, L., eds., 2006. The Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka (The Library of Living Philosophers). Open Court. Includes a complete bibliography of Hintikka's publications. ISBN 0812694627
- Bogdan, Radu, ed., 1987 Jaakko Hintikka, Kluwer Academic Publishers ISBN 9027724024
- Daniel KolakDaniel KolakDaniel Kolak is a Croatian-American philosopher who works primarily in philosophy of mind, personal identity, cognitive science, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of religion, and aesthetics...
, 2001 On Hintikka, Wadsworth ISBN 0-534-58389-X - Daniel KolakDaniel KolakDaniel Kolak is a Croatian-American philosopher who works primarily in philosophy of mind, personal identity, cognitive science, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of religion, and aesthetics...
and John Symons, eds., 2004 Quantifiers, Questions and Quantum Physics: Essays on the Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka Springer ISBN 1-4020-3210-2
See also
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism....
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- Saul KripkeSaul KripkeSaul Aaron Kripke is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center...
- Willard Van Orman QuineWillard Van Orman QuineWillard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition...
- Ludwig WittgensteinLudwig WittgensteinLudwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
- Alfred TarskiAlfred TarskiAlfred Tarski was a Polish logician and mathematician. Educated at the University of Warsaw and a member of the Lwow-Warsaw School of Logic and the Warsaw School of Mathematics and philosophy, he emigrated to the USA in 1939, and taught and carried out research in mathematics at the University of...
- Doxastic logic