Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka and Herbert Paul Grice: Implicature as a Game

Speranza

The difference between obituaries and Wikipedia is that Wikipedia, like 
Popper's W3 GROWS. So let's provide a running commentary on the ever-growing 
entry for Hintikka.

Hintikka was baptised Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka.

So, strictly, his initials go:

Hintikka, K. J. J.

In this he is superior to

Grice, H. P. -- who only has TWO Christian names.

Hintikka was "a Finnish philosopher and logician."

This implicates that logicians are not philosophers. Similarly, Bartlett's 
Dictionary's entry for Grice is "British logician", which WRONGLY
implicates he  was not a philosopher. In fact he was not a logician but a philosopher
of logic  or philosophical logician if you must.

Hintikka was born in Helsingin maalaiskunta (now Vantaa).

The 'now' Vanta is important and interesting. Similarly, Baron Russell was 
born English (or Welsh) because that part of England (or Wales) where he
had his  family seat was then part of England (or Wales) to later become part
of Wales  (or England). So we can say that Russell was Welsh or English (if
not  both).

After teaching for a number of years at Florida, Stanford, Helsinki, and 
the Academy of Finland, K. J. J. Hintikka became a Professor of Philosophy at
Boston.

He was familiar with the area since he had been a Harvard fellow earlier in
his career.

He lived in Marlborough, a charming little New England borough.

The prolific author or co-author of lots of books and essays, Hintikka 
contributed to

-- mathematical logic (his first love: recall his tutors were one 
philosopher -- von Wright -- and one mathematical logician).

-- philosophical logic

-- the philosophy of mathematics

-- epistemology -- or 'epistemics' and 'doxastics', as he preferred)

-- language theory

-- and the philosophy of science.

His works have appeared in over nine languages, that is 10.

Hintikka is regarded as the founder of formal epistemic logic and of  game
semantics for logic.

"Game-theoretical" semantics, as Geary reminds us, 'is no game'. The word 
'game' is used figuratively, after Witters used the example of 'game' to 
disprove the idea of a family resemblance ("Do I have a family resemblance
with  other members of the aristocratic Witters family?").

Early in his career, K. J. J. Hintikka devised a semantics of modal  logic
essentially analogous to Saul Kripke's frame semantics.

Kripke later got into a fight with Ruth Barcan Marcus about who invented 
stuff first.

-- No such polemic arose between Hintikka and Kripke.

K. J. J. Hintikka discovered the now widely taught semantic tableau, 
independently of Evert Willem Beth.

The word 'independently' is interesting from a Popperian point of view: 
'semantic tableaux' are part of W3, but there are different rigid-designators
to  Hintikka and Beth attached to them.

Later, K. J. J. Hintikka worked mainly on game semantics, and on 
independence-friendly logic, known for its "branching quantifiers", which he 
believed do better justice to our intuitions about quantifiers than does 
conventional first-order logic.

Grice also had doubts about the correctness of the 'classical logic' about 
quantifiers and he developed special quantifiers to deal with slogans like 
"Every nice girl loves a sailor": One-at-a-time-sailor and 
altogether-sailor.

Hintikka did important exegetical work on Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig 
Wittgenstein, and Charles Sanders Peirce and he provided at least ONE
exegesis  of Grice's logic of conversation in Philosophical Grounds of
Rationality:  Intentions, Categories, Ends (P. G. R. I. C. E. for short). Grice was
supposed  to provide a reply to Hintikka's contribution, but he changed his
mind (Changing  one's mind is accounted by K. J. J. Hintikka in terms of
'semantic tableaux':  Grice's tableau changed from one where he wanted to provide
a reply to one where  he did not).

Hintikka's work can be seen as a continuation of the analytic tendency in 
philosophy founded by Franz Brentano and Peirce, advanced by Gottlob Frege
and  Bertrand Russell, and continued by Rudolf Carnap, Willard Van Orman
Quine, and  by Hintikka's teacher Georg Henrik von Wright.

Von Wright brilliantly coined 'alethic' that Grice overuses in "Aspects of 

Reason". In Finnish, 'Wright' is pronounced /rixt/.

Hintikka wrote "The Principles of Mathematics Revisited", which takes  an
exploratory stance comparable to that Russell made with his "The Principles 
of Mathematics" in 1903.

"The Principles of Mathematics Revisited" has been compared (by Geary) to 
Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited" -- "only it's not fictional," he  adds.

Hintikka edited the academic journal "Synthese" and was a consultant 
editor for more than ten journals -- perhaps eleven.

Hintikka was the first vice-president of the Fédération Internationale  des
Sociétés de Philosophie, the Vice-President of the Institut International
de  Philosophie, as well as a member of the American Philosophical
Association, the  International Union of History and Philosophy of Science,
Association for  Symbolic Logic, and a member of the governing board of the Philosophy
of Science  Association.

Hintikka 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".

Some say that Rolf Schock was a genius.

Hintikka was president of the Florida Philosophical Association, based in 
Florida -- the 'sunshine state'.

Hintikka was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and  Letters.

-- where "Letters" is "Humanities". Snow develops the distinction between 
"Science" and "Letters" in his "Two Cultures". The Norwegian Academy is
supposed  to refute Snow.


A pretty complete bibliography of Hintikka is to be found in Auxier and 
Hahn.

Hintikka's essays include:

Knowledge and Belief – An Introduction to the Logic of the Two  Notions.

-- Popper possibly criticised this as it sees 'knowledge' as JTB (justified
true belief).

Models for Modalities: Selected Essays

The intentions of intentionality and other new models for modalities 

The semantics of questions and the questions of semantics: case studies in 
the interrelations of logic, semantics, and syntax

The Logic of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Logic

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths

Lingua Universalis vs Calculus Ratiocinator

The Principles of Mathematics Revisited

Paradigms for Language Theory and Other Essays

Language, Truth and Logic in Mathematics

Inquiry as Inquiry: A Logic of Scientific Discovery  -- an echo of 
Popper's more rotund, "THE logic of scientific discovery".

Analyses of Aristotle

Socratic Epistemology: Explorations of Knowledge-Seeking by Questioning

Secondary:

Auxier, R.E., and Hahn, L., eds., The Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka  (The
Library of Living Philosophers).
Open Court. Includes a complete bibliography of Hintikka's publications.

Bogdan, Radu, ed., Jaakko Hintikka, Kluwer Academic Publishers

Daniel Kolak, On Hintikka, Wadsworth -- there is a volume on Grice in this 
series.

Daniel Kolak and John Symons, eds., Quantifiers, Questions and Quantum 
Physics: Essays on the Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka Springer.

See also: Rudolf Carnap, Saul Kripke, Charles Sanders Peirce, Willard  Van
Orman Quine, Alfred Tarski, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Doxastic logic

Speranza

References:

Gruppe 3: Idéfag" (in Norwegian). Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

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