KAARLO JAAKKO JUHANI HINTIKKA and HERBERT PAUL GRICE: Implicature as Game

Speranza

Some say that if you are going to write an essay for a festschrift, you should state that you don't allow any reprint of that essay elsewhere: to reprint a festschrift essay elsewhere kills the point of the festchrift. Yet. Strawson re-published his "if and -->' elsewhere, as did Hintikka his essay on the logic of conversation (in Kasher, Pragmatics). Both were intended for the Grice festschrift.

For the record, a commentary on the volume in the "Library of Living 
Philosophers" series on Hintikka.


THE PHILOSOPHY OF JAAKO HINTIKKA
This is VOLUME 30.

While his full name was K. J. J. H., Hintikka went most of the time by 
Jaakko.

Hintikka is recognized as one of the handful of most creative, 
comprehensive, and rigorous philosophical minds.

His major contributions to philosophy range over a very wide area, most 
conspicuously:

-- logic
-- epistemology
-- philosophy of science
-- history of philosophy.

In this celebration, twenty-seven philosophers expound and criticise 
aspects of Hintikka's though, and he responds directly to each one of them with 
elegance and precision.

The volume also contains Hintikka's intellectual autobiography, as well as 
a comprehensive, up-to-date bibliography of all his published work.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Jaako Hintikka: Intellectual Autobiography


ESSAY I:

Simo Knuuttila: Hintikka's View of the History of Philosophy

---- What are Hintikka's views on the history of philosophy? He seems to 
have had a fascination (via his mentor, von Wright, for Witters, but he also 
liked Aristotle, and always enjoyed the work of Grice who was the cynosure
of  everyone while Hintikka was at Harvard.

ESSAY II:

Gabriel Motzkin: Hintikka's Ideas About the History of Ideas

"The History of Ideas" is a chair in Oxford once held by Berlin. By "Ideas"
we mean "Ideology". Not any idea does. "It was Joe's idea to do it" does
not  form part of the history of ideas, but Jefferson's views were.

ESSAY III:

Juliet Floyd:

On the Use and Abuse of Logic in Philosophy: Kant, Frege, and Hintikka on 
the Verb "To Be"

--- This relates to the essay by Grice on "Aristotle on the multiplicity of
being". Grice, against G. E. L. Owen ("The snares of ontology") thinks
that 'be'  is uniguous. But Grice distinguishes between:

(a) Socrates izz rational.

and

(b) Socrates hazz a flat nose.

Both come up as 'is' in Aristotle, but they shouldn't!

ESSAY IV: Judson C. Webb: Hintikka on Aristotelian Constructions, Kantian 
Intuitions, and Peircean Theorems

This is a comprehensive view of Hintikka's take on Aristotle, Kant and 
Peirce. I think he preferred Aristotle of all, and his last volume of Selected 
Papers is dedicated to Aristotle.

ESSAY V:

R.M. Dancy: Hintikka, Aristotle, and Existence

This overlaps a bit with Essay III. "Existentia" is not a word Aristotle 
would use. He would use 'ousia'. Hintikka distinguishes between 'existence'
(not  a predicate for Kant) and essence.

ESSAY VI:

Aaron Garrett: The Method of the Analyst

Hintikka is, like Grice, an analytic philosopher; but unlike Grice, 
Hintikka skips 'linguistic botanising' and goes straight to formalism.

ESSAY VII:

Karl-Otto Apel: Speculative-Hermeneutic Remarks on Hintikka's  Performatory
Interpretation of Descartes's Cogito, Ergo Sum

By 'performatory', Apel means 'performative' which is a lexical item J. L. 
Austin borrowed (but never returned from Scots law: 'operative'). The idea
is  that when Descartes said what he did in French he was doing things with
words.  Some have argued, wrongly, that performatives are neither true nor
false, and  Hintikka thinks this may shed light on what Descartes actually
DID with his  words.

ESSAY VIII:


Dagfinn Follesdal: Hintikka On Phenomenology

Phenomenology is not supposed to be analytic philosophy, but continental 
philosophy. The fat that Follesdal, who taught with Hintikka at Stanford,
thinks  that what Hintikka (an analytic philosopher) says about phenomenology
(a branch  of continental philosophy) is important goes to show how arbitrary
(contra Woody  Allen's recent film, "Irrational man", after book by
Barrett) can be.

ESSAY IX:

David Pears: Private Language

D. F. Pears with collaborator with H. P. Grice on work in the philosophy of
action. A student at Christ Church (the most prestigious college in
Oxford),  Pears knows what he is saying. Robinson Crusoe did have a private
language,  UNTIL HE MET FRIDAY.

ESSAY X

Mathieu Marion: Phenomenological Language, Thoughts, and Operations in  the
Tractatus

Hintikka had, via von Wright, a fascination for the three Witters: the 
first Witters of the Tractatus, the middle Witters, and the latter Witters. 
Operations is a key concept in the early Witters as Marion shows, and he
learned  this from Hintikka.

Essay XI:

Raymond M. Smullyan: A Logical Miscellany

By 'miscellany', Smullyan means a mischmasch. He learned this from 
Hintikka.

ESSAY XII:

Solomon Feferman: What Kind of Logic Is "Independence Friendly"  Logic?

We speak of X-friendly figuratively. Logic is not friendly, since only 
persons are friendly. A logician may be friendy. So a logician who is 
independence-friendly is possibly revolutionary, so beware! (Hintikka was  one!)

ESSAY XIII:

Johan Van Benthem: The Epistemic Logic of IF Games

Grice laughed at Strawson's account of 'if', for Strawson thought that he 
was doing first-rate ordinary language philosophy (in "Introduction to
Logical  Theory") and laughed at the fact that logicians's 'if' has NOTHING to do
with  HIS use of 'if'. Hintikka underestimates this polemic and bases his
games on  'if' -- as a background for his epistemic logic.

ESSAY XIV

Wilfrid Hodges: The Logic of Quantifiers

Hodges wrote a nice little volume on Logic for Penguin. Hintikka was 
obsessed with quantifiers: any, each, all. He noted that they can NOT all be 
symbolised, as Grice thinks, by (x). "Each clown can be funny". But this does 
not implicate that "ALL" clows are funny, let alone that "any clown is
funny" or  "every clown is funny". In fact, it may well be that NO clown is funny.

ESSAY XV:

Gabriel Sandu: Hintikka and the Fallacies of the New Theory of  Reference

By the New Theory of Reference we mean Ruth Barcan Marcus and Saul Kripke. 
Hintikka thought it was plagued with fallacies. This gave Dennett the idea
to  coin 'hintikka': "We discussed all night, but that did not lead me to
change ONE  hintikka about stuff".

ESSAY XVI

James Higginbotham: The Scope Hypothesis

This is a very important philosopher. Some say that Higginbotham is no 
philosopher, but a linguist, but Hintikka sometimes felt himself honoured that 
he was being treated seriously be linguists! The scope hypothesis
fascinated  Grice. He developed two theories to deal with it: the subscript device,
in  "Vacuous Names" (in Davidson/Hintikka, "Words and Objections) and the 
square-bracket device: e.g. "[The king of France] is not bald." IMPLICATES
there  is a king of France and we write that between square bracket and thus
make it  immune to criticism: a presupposition alla Collingwood. This allows
Grice to  avoid problems with truth-value gaps.

ESSAY XVII

Hans Sluga: Jaakko Hintikka (and Others) on Truth

Sluga is credited by Grice in "Presupposition and Conversational 
Implicature" for his help in analysing "the king of France is bald". Sluga,  unlike
Hintikka, was Oxonian-educated.

ESSAY XVIII:

Pascal Engel: Is Truth Effable?

Engel is playing on Witters for whom truth like the naming of cats is 
ineffable.

Engel (not to be confused with the plural Engels, a dangerous philosopher) 
betwen:

i. truth is effable.
ii. truth is ineffable
iii. truth is effanineffable.

Witters would have thought that truth was effanineffable, but G. E. M. 
Anscombe found that hard to translate.

ESSAY XIX:

Jan Wolenski: Tarskian and Post-Tarskian Truth

If Popper learned from Tarksi while seating on a bench in Vienna, Hintikka 
didn't.

ESSAY XX:

Philippe De Rouilhan and Serge Bozon: The Truth of IF: Has Hintikka  Really
Exorcised Tarski's Curse?

D. M. S. Edginton, once professor of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford, 
held that 'if' sentences do not have truth values. Tarski was known to curse
in  Polish (his native language). You make the connections. For the
exorcising of  curses vide Geary, "Secret Papers".

Essay XXI

Martin Kusch: Hintikka on Heidegger and the Universality of  Language

For Heidegger German was a universal language; for Hintikka Finnish was a 
universal language. For Kusch both were!

ESSAY XXII

Patrick Suppes: Hintikka's Generalizations of Logic and their Relation  to
Science

Suppes taught with Hinitkka at Stanford. Logic ain't science and science 
ain't logic. Logicians play with silly examples like "All ravens are black". 
Scientists, unless you are a biologist (and play with "Some ravens are
albino"),  don't.


ESSAY XXIII

Isaac Levi: Induction, Abduction, and Oracles

Hintikka delivered the second von Wright lecture on induction. Ab-duction 
was of course a coinage by Peirce. Oracles were heard at Delphi. Levi makes
all  the proper connections in connection with the War of the Peloponnesus.

ESSAY XXIV

Risto Hilpinen: Jaakko Hintikka on Epistemic Logic and  Epistemology

Perhaps the most quoted essay by Hintikka is his essay on knowledge, for 
which he uses the symbol "K", as in KAP, KKAP. The second reads that A knows 
that he knows that p.

Epistemology, for Hintikka, is epistemics, i.e. epistemic logic. And right 
he is!

ESSAY XV

Matti Sintonen: From the Logic of Questions to the Logic of  Inquiry

Questions and inquiry have been related since Hobbes. For Hobbes, the 
scientist asks questions to Nature, and Nature never lies.

ESSAY XVI

Theo A.F. Kuipers: Inductive Aspects of Confirmation, Information, and 
Content

Hintikka, unlike Popper, was stuck with induction. But also with 
confirmation, information, and content. He was so much into content that Dennett 
coined 'hintikka' to refer to a belief that varies infinitesimally from 
another.

ESSAY XVII

Michael Meyer: Questioning Art

The sad thing is that it's artist (notably Andy Warhol) who first and 
foremost question art, when they should just sell it!

The volume concludes with a Bibliography of the Writings of Jaakko  Hintikka

Cheers,

Speranza



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