Perspectives on the Logical Study of Language

Journal of Logic, Language and Information - JOLLI, 1999

Abstract. Introduction to the Special Issue in Logica Universalis on Jaakko Hintikka’s Logical Philosophy, with biographical and bibliographical re- marks. Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 03A10; Secondary 01A70. Keywords. Jaakko Hintikka, Biography, Logic, Philosophy of logic, His- tory of logic. Hintikka’s philosophical career began in the late 1940s with his visits to Williams College, Harvard and MIT, and it came to span over eight decades. His legacy consists of 60 books, 400 scientific papers, and a number of motivated students who have proved to be highly successful in their professional careers. Editor-in-Chief of Synthese for 40 years, Hintikka held permanent and visiting appointments at dozens of institutions, including Harvard, Stanford, Brown, California Berkeley, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Helsinki, Florida State and Boston University.

Logica Universalis, 2019

Jaakko Hintikka (1929-2015) points out the power of Skolem functions to affect both what there is and what we know. There is a tension in his presupposition that these functions actually extend the realm of logic. He claims to have resolved the tension by "reconstructing constructivism" along epistemological lines, instead of by a typical ontological construction; however, after the collapse of the distinction between first and second order, that resolution is not entirely satisfactory. Still, it does throw light on the conceptual analysis Hintikka proposes.

2018

It is indeed a great honour and privilege to respond to Professor Jaakko Hintikka’s challenging and provocative paper, ‘Philosophical Research: Problems and Prospects’.1 I have been a long time reader and admirer of Professor Hintikka’s work, especially his writings on Husserl, but beginning many years ago with his groundbreaking work on Descartes’ cogito as performance rather than inference (Hintikka, 2005). I also want to acknowledge publicly the sterling work he performed as Vice-President of the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP) in organizing the very successful 21st World Congress of Philosophy held in Boston in August 1998.2 Jaakko Hintikka has worked at the highest level of the profession over many years – he is one of the very few whose work has featured in the Library of Living Philosophers series (Auxier and Hahn, 2006) and he has a six-volume collection of papers published. He has made revolutionary contributions to logic, set theory, semantics,...

The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 2007

We discuss Hintikka's Thesis [Hintikka 1973] that there exist natural language sentences which require non–linear quantification to express their logical form. Our basic assumption is that the criterion for adequacy of logical form is its compatibility with sentence truth conditions. It can be established by observing linguistic behaviour of language users. Our empirical research shows that there is a statistically significant preference to interpret Hintikka–like sentences with the most quantifier as having some linear (we call them ...

Journal for General Philosophy of Science

One of the many research projects of Jaakko Hintikka was entitled ''Logical tools for human thinking and their history''. This is in fact an apt summary of the lifetime work of this master logician who developed several new methods and systems in mathematical and philosophical logic, among them distributive normal forms, model sets, possible-worlds semantics, epistemic logic, doxastic logic, inductive logic, semantic information, game-theoretical semantics, interrogative approach to inquiry, and independence-friendly logic. He applied them to study problems in philosophy of language, formal epistemology, and philosophy of science. He combined systematic work with novel interpretations of important historical figures like Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Peirce, and Wittgenstein. Hintikka was one of the most cited analytic philosophers, and he influenced logic and philosophy also as a successful teacher and the long-time editor of the journal Synthese. Keywords Epistemic logic Á Game-theoretical semantics Á Independence-friendly logic Á Inductive logic Á Interrogative model of inquiry Á Possible-worlds semantics 1 Life and Career K. Jaakko J. Hintikka was born on 12 January 1929 in the Helsinki county (Vantaa) in Finland. His father Toivo had made his Ph.D. degree in botany and plant pathology, and his mother Lempi was an elementary school teacher. His two uncles had Ph.D. degrees in technology and mathematics. After finishing his high school in Kerava in 1947, Jaakko Hintikka started his studies at the University of Helsinki. His major subject up to his & Ilkka Niiniluoto

1998

This paper reminds, puts in order, sketches and also initiates some researches from the field of logic and philosophy of language. It lays emphasis on the logical-linguistic and ontological developmental lines originated with Polish researchers. The author discusses two opposite orientations of the former line in the process of formalization of language, called here nominalistic and Platonistic. The paper mentions the author's result (1989; 1991) concerning theoretical equivalence of two axiomatic approaches to language syntax which take into consideration these two different philosophical orientations, respectively. It also introduces certain formal-logical foundations of language semantics, discusses and develops the problem of the syntactic and semantic categorial agreement, i.e. the agreement of the syntactic category of each language expression with the ontological category assigned to the reference of this expression. The author, in particular, gives a solution to this problem for quantifiers.

Hans van Ditmarsch H., Gabriel Sandu (eds) Jaakko Hintikka on Knowledge and Game-Theoretical Semantics. Outstanding Contributions to Logic,, 2018

Hintikka’s semantic approach to meaning, a development of Wittgenstein’s view of meaning as use, is the general theme of this chapter. We will focus on the analysis of quantified sentences and on the scope of the principle of compositionality and compare Hintikka’s take on these issues with that of Frege. The aim of this paper is to show that Hintikka’s analysis of quantified expressions as choice functions, in spite of its obvious dissimilarities with respect to the higher-order approach, is actually very close to the Fregean stance on compositionality and context dependence. In particular, we will defend that the Fregean approach to quantifiers is unavoidably linked to the idea that quantified expressions are context-dependent, and therefore should not be conceived under the traditional inside-out model for analysis.

The Development of Modern Logic, 2009

Linguistic, Philosophy, Language, Literature, Art, Logic, Analitic Philosophy, , 2017

THE JOURNEY OF THOUGHT FROM LOGIC TO LANGUAGE, FROM PHILOSOPHY TO LITERATURE Abstract The discipline of philosophy and thinking facilities generally focus on the subjects, objects and devices of thought, and this facility turns into something high in intellectual when thinking about the thinking itself occurs. Thinking about and concretizing the thinking process, generally induces people to dig deep in the fields of logic and language. This article firstly aims to clarify the relationship of thought with the logic and language which has been established by the thought during the process of its resolution, then, in doing so, it focuses on the fact that the field of language takes logic’s place in the course of time and thus a philosophical activity as a product of logic gives its place to a literary activity as a product of language. This paper also aims at pointing out the causes and the results of this process. It clarifies the transformation of the categories of the field of logic into that of linguistics.