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Hintikka Memorial Issue: Introduction and Remarks on Jaakko Hintikka’s

Logical Philosophy

Article  in  Logica Universalis · June 2019

DOI: 10.1007/s11787-019-00222-4

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Introduction:
Jaakko Hintikka’s Logical Philosophy
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen

Abstract. Introduction to the Special Issue in Logica Universalis on

Jaakko Hintikka’s Logical Philosophy.
Mathematics Subject Classification (2010). 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 moti-
vated 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, Stan-
ford, Brown, California Berkeley, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Helsinki,
Florida State and Boston University.1
Hintikka’s citation indices are equally gargantuan. Even though he did
not care much about bibliometric details, today his h-index is a stellar 71.
The list is topped by Knowledge and Belief (1962) with over 4,000 citations.
Altogether there are 27,000 citations to his publications (Publish or Perish,
retrieved August 2018), a number doubling or tripling most of those who one
might take to be ‘philosophical celebrities’. From roughly the same generation
of philosophers and covering similar systematic and theoretical areas of phi-
losophy, only Mario Bunge, Rom Harré and Daniel D. Dennett can currently
say to enjoy even more citations to their work.
In the light of such unprecedented academic success, it is worthwhile to
take a look at the impact of Hintikka’s work in such terms. In addition to the

Supported by the Estonian Research Council, Personal Research Grant PUT 1305, Ab-
duction in the Age of Fundamental Uncertainty, Principle Investigator A.-V. Pietarinen,
2016–2018.
1 For a detailed autobiographical material on Hintikka’s life and work, see e.g. [8, 11, 12].
2 Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen

fifteen books and their chapters that make it to the top twenty of his most
cited works, his ten most cited papers are, in this order, the following:
1. “Semantics for Propositional Attitudes” (1969, 521 citations)
2. “Existential Presuppositions and Uniqueness Presuppositions” (1969,
500 citations)
3. “Impossible Possible Worlds Vindicated” (1979, 412 citations)
4. “Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?” (1962, 347 citations)
5. “What Is Abduction? The Fundamental Problem of Contemporary Epis-
temology” (1998, 263 citations)
6. “Quantifiers vs. Quantification Theory” (1974, 220 citations)
7. “Modality and Quantification” (1961, 202 citations)
8. “The Semantics of a Certain” (1986, 200 citations)
9. “A Two-dimensional Continuum of Inductive Methods” (1966, 173 cita-
tions)
10. “The Emperor’s New Intuitions” (1999, 166 citations).
Notwithstanding the technical limitation that the system can compile only
1,000 entries before halting, we can take this to be a quite representative
cross-selection of his general research themes. By far been the most referred-
to topic in the secondary literature has been the problem of quantification
in modal and epistemic logic, which counts as roughly half of the overall
citations that have accumulated over the decades. The other prominent theme
has been the problem of logical omniscience, which Hintikka did not in fact
take to be a real problem in epistemic logic, since the epistemic notions as
he formulated them were intended to model implicit, not explicit knowledge.
Indeed epistemic and modal logic became major methodological approaches
in philosophical and computational logic, although not quite in the manner
or direction in which Hintikka wanted to see them go.
The Descartes/Parmenides paper, inspired by Austin’s lectures, shows
how some shop-worn topics from the history of philosophy could be ap-
proached anew from the perspectives of fresh linguistic and logical analysis
and insight: his Cogito-paper portrays path-breaking lines of logical thought
that revealed a self-defeating character of any attempt to think or assert that
one does not exist.
In the late sixties and early seventies, the discovery of branching quan-
tifiers (Henkin quantifiers, [3]) opened up new directions into which Hin-
tikka took the study of natural-language quantification, and of which IF
(independence-friendly) logic is only an inevitable and natural generaliza-
tion. Abduction and Peirce’s logic have also been close to Hintikka’s heart
ever since his early years—much closer than Frege or most other household
figures in analytic philosophy have been. “Peirce—miles ahead of Frege in
logic and in the philosophy of mathematics”, he once told me. A minor sur-
prise in this top ten list is the note on the meaning of a certain; a paper which
caught on with the linguists and natural-language semanticists in the 1980s.
Again, the impact of that paper can be explained by the creative insight it
provides on how a certain structural and logical property is instantiated in
 Introduction 3

informal cognitive and natural-language material. Finding out such connec-

tions and associations between structural relations in logic on the one hand
and, in language or in thinking on the other, has always his particular forte.
Especially his middle period, from mid-1960s until 1980s, was a highly
successful one in Hintikka’s career. That was also the time when he directed
a true centre of excellence in Finland, with Risto Hilpinen, Juhani Pietari-
nen and Raimo Tuomela as its first bumper crop—decades before such eu-
phemisms as ‘centres of excellence’ had been coined.
In later years, Hintikka identified a certain apathy that had broken out
not only among contemporary philosophers and philosophical communities
but also among research policy makers, panelists, external experts and re-
viewers: a collective disbelief that genuine progress can be made on difficult
problems that have defied progress for quite some time (see e.g. [13, 20]).
Contemporary philosophers, experts and evaluators have taken the sufficient
measure of progress to be that one’s work contributes to the ongoing “debates”
on relevant matters, how “exegetic” and “scholarly” one’s research products
are, and how explicitly those interpretations and conclusions are spelled out
already at the stages of writing the research proposals. But Hintikka’s ap-
proach to creative work stood in stark contrast to such quasi-scientific qual-
ities: his mind was always focussed on large aims and ends, generating hy-
potheses whose value is in their economy and uberty. The most valuable ones
are those that open up avenues for further work. It was not his rationale to
make explicit all the conclusions and impacts that may follow. Yet there was
never anything proprietary in Hintikka’s philosophical and scientific ideas. In
that good old Peircean spirit he often remarked that truly insightful ideas
cannot be owned—such ideas worth spreading would continue live their life
anyway.
Hintikka’s criticism extended to the very heart of the peer review sys-
tem, and to the abuse of that system in today’s publication practices in
professional philosophy:

The sad fact is that in our field the referee system has collapsed.
(There are undoubtedly some exceptions and your journal hope-
fully is one of them.) It is bad enough that competent referees are
impossible to find in sufficient numbers. The catastrophe is that
the referees that major journals rely on do not act responsibly
any longer. They do not try to understand the paper they are
reading. Instead they are looking for excuse to form a recommen-
dation without having to do any thinking.
Furthermore, those few referees who are using substantial
standards normally belong to one of the numerous cliques into
which philosophy and philosophical logic has split. The members
of one clique do not know and do not care what adherents of
the other cult are doing. The standards that a referee is using
are those of her or his private club and hence idiosyncratic and
4 Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen

ill-educated. The outcome is well calculated to guarantee that no

new ideas are published.2
Similar charges may be applied not only to the referees but also to the editors,
search committee experts and panelists whose task supposedly is to provide
an objective assessment of the merits of a given scholarly and scientific body
of work. I remember one junior editor-in-chief of a reputed philosophy journal
once sporting how their policy is to advise referees particularly to look for
errors in submissions. But if all you do is to avoid errors in your arguments,
you will never become a master of argumentative strategies, Hintikka would
comment.
In the formidable task of estimating somebody’s significance not only
to the academic philosophy of one’s lifetime but well into the deep future,
one can use Hintikka’s own tripartite analysis of the meaning of such “sig-
nificance”: First, there are those professional philosophers who have greatly
contributed to philosophical discussion. They are found occupying top ranks
in citation indices, and doctoral dissertations are written on their works. As
far as their ideas, results and scientific contributions are concerned, such pro-
fessional philosophers need not be the bearers of the most significant ideas,
however. The research areas that their suggestions are concerned with may
turn out to be bubbles and hardly more than full of internal jargon. Sec-
ond, there are those whose ideas, insights and accomplishments can truly be
said to be remarkable and significant, especially in the long run that only
time and not the cult can tell. Third, there are those who can be associated
with what ‘being a philosopher’ apparently means to many: an ideal of the
presence of a wise personality, whose contributions to the profession work
through important societal involvement and cultural resonance.
It may be too early to predict the importance and impact of Hintikka’s
work to the philosophy of the 21th -century and beyond. We have already
attested the first sense of significance. As far as the second sense is concerned,
truly new ideas may often be forgotten for a long time before they are ripe
for a rediscovery, often without acknowledgment. Hintikka’s propositions were
never calculated to be safe in the sense that they would provide an easy route
to PhD dissertations or tenure promotions. They demand great navigational
skills guided by the grand map of logic, science and the history of intellectual
ideas. And in his research, that logic undergoes a constant revision. One might
twist the quip and say that if Hintikka’s impact to the future of philosophy
turns out not to be what he himself wanted to bring about, then also that is
what he wanted to bring about. The greatest tribute one can therefore think
of is to attempt to develop further, criticize or even refute the ideas that
he has proposed, and to discover something that one day might be realized
to have been due to the growth of such ideas in the great continuum of
philosophical thought.

2 Hintikka to Jean-Yves Beziau, personal communication on 1 July 2011. Quoted by per-

mission.
 Introduction 5

His own description of the categories in which he perceived having made

contributions to the advancement of intellectual thought was as follows:
Philosophy of Language and Theoretical Linguistics. Game-theoretical seman-
tics, methodology of linguistics, logic and semantics of questions and of
question-based dialogues, semantic information and its varieties, the analytic-
synthetic distinction, possible-worlds semantics, etc.
Foundations of Cognitive Science. Interrogative model of inquiry, differences be-
tween information processing by humans and computers, knowledge represen-
tation and reasoning about knowledge, the psychology of reasoning, mental
models, etc.
Philosophical Logic. Semantics of intensional logics, game-theoretical semantics,
independence-friendly logics, non-standard interpretations of logic, problems
of individuation and identification, nature of reasoning, urn models, deductive
information, etc.
Mathematical Logic and Foundations of Mathematics. Distributive normal forms,
independence-friendly logic, definability, infinitely deep languages, extremal-
ity assumptions in mathematical theories, etc.
Philosophy of Science. Interrogative models of scientific inquiry, the concepts of
experiment and induction, why-questions and explanation, inductive logic,
decision-theoretical approaches to theory choice, information as utility, iden-
tifiability problems in science, theory structure and the different ingredients
of an empirical theory, interplay between history of science and philosophy of
science, etc.
History of Philosophy and History of Ideas. Aristotle, the general assumptions
of Greek philosophy, modal concepts in medieval philosophy, Descartes, Leib-
niz, Kant, the history of the method of analysis, the “principle of plenitude”
in the history of philosophy, methodology of the history of ideas, etc.
Interpretations of Recent and Contemporary Philosophy. Frege, Peirce, Rus-
sell, the Bloomsbury Group, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Carnap, Quine, etc.
Philosophy of Education. Models of instruction, the role of questions and an-
swers in education, etc.
Aesthetics. Problems of pictorial representation, philosophy and literature, in-
tentionality and artistic creation, etc. (quoted from Hintikka’a official CV)
Regarding the categories of the History of Ideas and Interpretations of
Recent Philosophy, I would also highlight his early writings from the 1950s
and 1960s as those not known to many having been published only in Swedish
or Finnish in local papers, books and magazines. The topics and figures Hin-
tikka analyzed in those writings included Kepler, Galileo, Spengler and Eino
Kaila. He also wrote some little-known papers in the areas of political phi-
losophy and philosophy of law. Those who knew him well, and in the light of
these less-known contributions, one could well take Hintikka’s significance to
have encompassed also its third sense.

The papers included in the present issue represent only a modest sample of
this abundance of research themes that Hintikka incessantly wrestled with.
The first paper in the present selection continues the story of the his-
tory of intellectual ideas. In Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen’s paper “To Peirce
Hintikka’s Thoughts”, Hintikka’s philosophical approach and methodology is
6 Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen

shown to come surprisingly close to Peirce’s pragmaticism, and much more

so than has currently been realized ([21]). But this is not solely because of
the kind of analytic approach that we find characterizing both Hintikka’s
and Peirce’s logical philosophies. Both would be grossly mischaracterized if
they were classified within the trend known as analytical philosophy. Some
of the connections between pragmaticism and Hintikka’s philosophy can be
explained by the similarities in the methods of logic and the significance of
logical notations, relational thinking, the value of proofs, and the semantic
(model-theoretic, semeiotic) approach both thinkers availed themselves of in
philosophical investigation. Many more are aligned because they put scien-
tific and human inquiry ahead of epistemology. I term their epistemologies the
action-first and knowledge-last epistemologies. From this systematic perspec-
tive, a number of close similarities can be identified. The true depth of these
interconnections is reflected in the comment I once received from Jaakko to
my presentation of some of these connections, where I had suggested that
the sheer number of them makes one almost to believe in reincarnation. He
replied: “Yes, but who incarnated whom?”
Hintikka’s model-set technique provides insights both into the nature of
logical theories as well as their philosophical import. Hintikka worked out the
model systems in order to give interpretations for modal logics. His interpre-
tational aims were closely connected to the construction of canonical models
and thus completeness proofs in modal logic as shown in his 1953 paper, and
in this way are also strongly connected to the tableaux method for modal
logics. Kripke’s 1959 paper is the realization of that connection. When Hin-
tikka in 1955 proposed the technique ([5]) it was “published just a couple of
weeks before Beth’s first seminal 1955 paper on the tableau method” [8, p. 11],
see [1]. Hintikka’s 1962 book on epistemic logic [7] is then an illustration of
the versatility of the method of model systems. In Minghui Ma’s work on
sub-intuitionistic logic (“Labelled Tableau Systems for Some Subintuitionis-
tic Logics”), Hintikka’s method of model sets is applied in a novel domain,
proving the completeness of labelled tableau systems for three subintuition-
istic logics ([18]). Since both intuitionistic logic and its weaker forms can be
taken to provide some important philosophical and epistemological insights
into the nature of logic, the proposed expansion of the model-set technique
should thus not be seen only as a new tool; Hintikka’s original proposal can
throw new light on the very nature of logic and constructive knowledge.
The model set technique is an example of a method in which rigidity
is a useless concept. Tuukka Tanninen (“Varieties of Rigidity”) surveys
Hintikka’s critical approach to rigidity and its various senses that lasted over
half the century and which did not begin with Kripke’s contributions nor
ended with what Kripke had to pronounce on that notion ([23]).
Indeed in [6] Hintikka had extended the instrument of model sets to
quantified modal logic. Matthieu Fontaine in “Hintikka, Free Logician—
Singular Terms in World Lines Semantics” takes up a related prominent
 Introduction 7

theme, quantification and the notion of the world lines in Hintikka’s seman-
tics of quantification. Fontaine interprets Hintikka’s proposal as the method
of free logic, concluding on the non-rigidity of names in such semantics based
on world lines ([2]).
These proposed interpretations of Hintikka’s thoughts on varieties of
rigidity and the nature of semantics for modal notions lead naturally to
themes drawn up in Giovanni Mion’s article (“Hintikka on the ‘Kant–Frege
View’: A Critical Assessment”). Mion argues that Hintikka’s argument that
Kant did not precede Frege’s view of existence in taking it not to be a real
predicate is not fully satisfactory, as Kant’s and Frege’s claims may be seen as
logically interdependent ([19]). The next article, “On TAE Machines and their
Computational Power” by Apostolos Syropoulos ([22]) reviews the the-
ory of the Trial-and-Error machines and the TAE-computable Skolem func-
tions which Hintikka and Mutanen had proposed as an alternative, super-
Turing theory of computation. Skolem functions play another, important
role in the paper by Montgomery Link (“Hintikka and the Functions of
Logic”, [16]), namely in attempts to resolve the issue of whether the distinc-
tion between the first and second-order logic collapses in the way Hintikka
has proposed since the mid-1950s, arguments revived in his The Principles
of Mathematics Revisited ([10]) and later.
The reminiscences of discussions with Hintikka by Wang Lu (“Inno-
vation and Application of Logic: An Interview with Jaakko Hintikka”, [17]),
written in the format of an interview, importantly complements the biograph-
ical and autobiographical material that is currently available on Hintikka’s
thought and his professional life ([8, 11, 12]).
Two papers from Hintikka himself conclude the present special issue.
The first, “Perspectives on the Logical Study of Language” was originally
published in Finnish in 1956, and was his first academic publication in
Finnish ([14]). It appears in its English translation here for the first time.
The preparation of that article was preceded by two review commentaries on
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that were published in a Finnish
cultural magazine Suomalainen Suomi in 1955.3 The paper next year was
published in Ajatus, the yearbook of the Philosophical Society of Finland, in
which many of Hintikka’s contributions appeared at the early stages of his
career.

3 These are: “Tutkimus filosofiasta” (“A Study on Philosophy”), Suomalainen Suomi 4/1955,
pp. 206–211, and “Tutkimus kielestä” (“A Study on Language”), Suomalainen Suomi
5/1955, pp. 272–277. They are not listed in Hintikka’s official list of publications. In
the latter paper, Hintikka observes what much later came to be known as the ill-named
Wittgenstein–Kripke problem of following rules, together with what his interpretation of
Wittgenstein’s dissolution to that obvious sceptical criticism was. To mean by ‘under-
standing the rule’ something else than merely following it as a certain technique, Hintikka
explains, one has to demand certain additional guarantees that one has in fact hit upon
a genuine understanding and not only an illusion of understanding, and that those guar-
antees can be received only from the “conceptual environment” in which language is used;
they cannot be contained in any private or singular event.
8 Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen

The second and final nourishment is a reprint of a small piece “Super

Models”, which Hintikka wrote to the Feschtrift of one of his gifted students,
Veikko (‘Vexi’) Rantala, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. As that piece
is not generally available even online, it is provided here for the benefit of
a larger readership ([15]). Another and even more substantial motivation to
include that piece in the present issue is that the maxims of extremality
that give rise to super-models (see also [9]) sprout from Hintikka’s earliest
contributions to logic, namely the distributive normal forms and the concept
of constituents contained in those forms ([4]). It is an apt illustration of
the versatility and universality of these methods, as well as of the confidence
Hintikka laid upon them, that his last scientific presentation which took place
in the Logic Colloquium in August 2015 was entitled “Distributive Normal
Forms 2015”. There Hintikka explored some future prospects of these old
methods with the hope of them to give rise to an entirely new kind of real
mathematics with its non-set-theoretical and practice-based principles.

References
[1] Beth, E. W. (1969/1955). Semantic Entailment and Formal Derivability. In
J. Hintikka (ed.). The Philosophy of Mathematics. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1969, pp. 9–41. Originally published in 1955 as Mededelingen
van de Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen. Afdeling Let-
terkunde, N. R. 19(13), Amsterdam, pp. 309–342.
[2] Fontaine, M. (2018). Hintikka, Free Logician. Singular
Terms in World Lines Semantics. Logica Universalis 12(3).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11787-018-0197-4
[3] Henkin, L. (1961). Some Remarks on Infinitely Long Formulas, Finitistic
Methods: Proceedings of the Symposium on Foundation of Mathematics, War-
saw.
[4] Hintikka, J. (1953). A New Approach to Sentential Logic. Societas Scien-
tiarum Fennica, Commentationes Physica-Mathematicæ 17(3).
[5] Hintikka, J. (1955). Form and Content in Quantification Theory. Acta Philo-
sophica Fennica 8, pp. 11–55.
[6] Hintikka, J. (1961). Modality and Quantification, Theoria 27, pp. 119–128.
[7] Hintikka, J. (1962). Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction into the Logic of
the Two Notions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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 Introduction 9

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[17] Wang, L. (2018). Innovation and Application of Logic: An Interview with
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[18] Ma, M. (2018). Labelled Tableau SYstems for Some Subintuitionistic Logics.
Logica Universalis 12(3). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11787-018-0201-z
[19] Mion, G. (2018). Hintikka on the ‘KantâĂŞFrege
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[20] Pietarinen, A.-V. (2016). ‘On the Possibilities of Philosophical Research’:
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[22] Syropoulos, A. (2018). On TAE Machines and Their Computational Power.
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[23] Tanninen, T. (2018). Varieties of Rigidity. Logica Universalis 12(3).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11787-018-0199-2

Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen
Tallinn University of Technology
e-mail: ahti-veikko.pietarinen@ttu.ee

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