Jaakko Hintikka was born on January 12th, 1929. He received his doctorate from the University of Helsinki under the supervision of Professor G. H. von Wright at the age of 24 in 1953. Hintikka was appointed Professor of philosophy at the University of Helsinki in 1959. Since the late 50s, he has shared his time between Finland and the U.S.A. He was appointed Professor of philosophy at Stanford University in 1964. As from 1970 Hintikka has been permanent research professor (...) of the Academy of Finland. He has published 13 books and about 200 articles, not to mention the various editorial and organizational activities he has played an active role in. The present collection of essays has been edited to honour Jaakko Hintikka on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. By dedicating a Festschrift to Jaakko Hintikka, the contributors wish to pay homage to this remarkable man whom they see not only as a scholar of prodigious energy and insight, but as a friend, colleague and former teacher. The contributors hope the essays collected here will bring pleasure to the man they are intended to honour. All of the essays touch upon topics Hintikka has taken an direct or indirect interest in, ranging from technical problems of mathematical logic and applications of formal methods through philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and history of philosophy to philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

A novel theory of comparative risk is developed and defended. Extant theories are criticized for failing the tests of extensional and formal adequacy. A unified diagnosis is proposed: extant theories consider risk to be a univariable function, but risk is a multivariate function. According to the theory proposed, which we call the unified theory of risk, the riskiness of a proposition is a function of both the proportion and the modal closeness of the possible worlds at which the proposition holds. (...) It is argued the theory passes the tests of extensional and formal adequacy. (shrink)

Most current work in epistemology deals with the evaluation and justification of information already acquired. In this book, Jaakko Hintikka instead discusses the more important problem of how knowledge is acquired in the first place. His model of information-seeking is the old Socratic method of questioning, which has been generalized and brought up-to-date through the logical theory of questions and answers that he has developed. Hintikka also argues that philosophers' quest for a definition of knowledge is ill-conceived and that (...) the entire notion of knowledge should be replaced by the concept of information. He offers an analysis of the different meanings of the concept of information and of their interrelations. The result is a new and illuminating approach to the field of epistemology. (shrink)

This book, written by one of philosophy's pre-eminent logicians, argues that many of the basic assumptions common to logic, philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics are in need of change. It is therefore a book of critical importance to logical theory. Jaakko Hintikka proposes a new basic first-order logic and uses it to explore the foundations of mathematics. This new logic enables logicians to express on the first-order level such concepts as equicardinality, infinity, and truth in the same language. The (...) famous impossibility results by Gödel and Tarski that have dominated the field for the last sixty years turn out to be much less significant than has been thought. All of ordinary mathematics can in principle be done on this first-order level, thus dispensing with the existence of sets and other higher-order entities. (shrink)

An evening discussion between professors Jaakko Hintikka and Simo Knuuttila on September 2, 2007, at the Helsinki conference: Knuuttila: Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for inviting us to this event and for this opportunity to discuss the latest volume of the Library of Living Philosophers, which was published last spring. The title of the volume is “The Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka”. Probably most people here know this series, which was founded in 1939 by P. A. Schilpp. The idea (...) of the volumes is to invite some prominent philosophers to describe their lives and ideas and then ask other philosophers to write and comment on topics which the first author has written about. Then the philosopher to whom the book is dedicated answers and discusses these other people’s papers about his or her philosophy. These volumes gradually became a very popular series which most philosophical libraries wanted to have. It was considered such a good idea, giving rise to one of the most prestigious series in philosophy. It is also considered as a kind of philosophical honor for the philosopher to be chosen to be among these living philosophers. The books always have the same structure; first, an intellectual autobiography, pretty extensive, then the papers on the basic author’s philosophy and, last, the papers are answered separately. So there is a kind of discussion going on. The book on Jaakko Hintikka’s philosophy consists of almost 1000 pages. It is also available as a paperback. Now, I have prepared some questions. (shrink)

In this paper, I assess some recent critical realist constructive criticisms of Theodor Adorno, one of the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory. I argue that while there are similarities between Adorno’s treatment of causality and the critical realist notion of powers, these connections should not be taken to imply that Adorno’s conception of critique requires a critical realist powers ontology. I show that Bhaskar’s transcendental realism is at odds with the basic commitments of Adorno’s historical (...) materialism. I go on to clarify such materialism and show that to Adorno, capital is the historical compulsion characteristic of modernity. (shrink)

While various strategic business issues related to product design have been explored by academicians and practitioners, one issue has largely been ignored: how do financial markets assess and evaluate companies’ product design? The purpose of this article is to examine this issue, especially when it comes to the assessments and evaluations made by the most essential actors of contemporary financial markets: investment analysts and institutional investors. I develop propositions concerning the product design-related evaluative schemes and heuristics used by the financial (...) market actors in evaluating companies as investment opportunities. I illustrate my propositions with examples from, e.g., the mobile phone industry as well as with interview excerpts from interviews with investment analysts and institutional investors. Propositions are provided both for assessments of companies’ individual end products (‘design as the end product’ perspective) and for assessments of companies’ design capabilities (‘design as a capability’ perspective). In essence, the propositions highlight that the evaluative schemes used by financial market actors are partly rational, yet involve biases and are likely to lead to overvaluation and undervaluation of certain kinds of product designs by certain kinds of companies. Thus, even from the perspective of profit-maximization, many of the evaluative schemes of the financial market actors are, at most, quasi-rational. Moreover, the evaluative schemes of the financial market actors may motivate company managers to pursue certain kinds of product design rather than others—and may even lead to self-reinforcing (vicious or virtuous) circles of certain kinds of product designs being advocated. (shrink)

According to the modal account of luck it is a matter of luck that p if p is true at the actual world, but false in a wide‐range of nearby worlds. According to the modal account of risk, it is risky that p if p is true at some close world. I argue that the modal accounts of luck and risk do not mesh well together. The views entail that p can be both maximally risky and maximally lucky, but there (...) is nothing which is both maximally lucky and maximally risky. I offer a novel theory of risk that fits together with the modal account of luck and demonstrate that it is both extensionally and formally superior to extant proposals. (shrink)

This article develops a modal theory of justification, according to which a belief is justified if it is more possible that it amounts to knowledge than that it does not. The core of the theory is neutral between internalism and externalism and it solves two problems that extant modal accounts of justification suffer from. In developing the theory, an account of comparative possibility is provided to yield degrees of justification.

Reality’s next top model? Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9475-3 Authors Jaakko Kuorikoski, Philosophy of Science Group/Social and Moral Philosophy, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 24, 00014 Helsinki, Finland Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Mammalian mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) replication and repair have been studied intensively for the last 50 years. Although recently advances in elucidating the molecular mechanisms of mtDNA maintenance and the proteins involved in these have been made, there are disturbing gaps between the existing theoretical models and experimental observations. Conflicting data and hypotheses exist about the role of RNA and ribonucleotides in mtDNA replication, but also about the priming of replication and the formation of pathological rearrangements. In the presented review, we (...) have attempted to match these loose ends and draft consensus where it can be found, while identifying outstanding issues for future research. (shrink)

Integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) into a for-profit organization’s business activities is fraught with tensions. This paper reports a case study of a construction company, exploring how different tensions emerged to challenge company-level aspirations for strategic CSR integration. The study identifies three types of persistent CSR tensions and four management practices, discussing how the management practices led the organization to navigate CSR tensions in both active and defensive ways. Furthermore, the study explicates why the case company succeeded in integrating CSR (...) into formal business strategy and shared attitudes but struggled with CSR integration in the domain of day-to-day operations. The paper contributes to the CSR literature by developing a tension-centric perspective on CSR development. It highlights the necessity of tension navigation at both the organizational and the action levels, the key role of active (as opposed to defensive) navigation of CSR tensions, and the importance of alignment between organizational and action levels in navigating tensions for sustaining strategic focus on CSR over time. (shrink)

We mobilise contemporary philosophy of science to further clarify observations on economic modelling made by Gilboa et al. (2023). We adopt a normative stance towards these modelling practices to identify the extent to which they are epistemically justified. Our message is simple: many of the distinctions proposed by Gilboa et al. (2023) are useful, but without the proper qualifications, too much flexibility in choosing the right interpretation risks downplaying the crucial role that empirical evidence should play in any modelling endeavour.

Edmund Husserl’s eidetic phenomenology seeks a priori knowledge of essences and eidetic laws pertaining to conscious experience and its objects. Husserl believes that such eidetic knowledge has a higher epistemic status than the inherently fallible empirical knowledge, but a closer reading of his work shows that even eidetic claims are subject to error and open to modification. In this article, I develop a self-correcting account of Husserl’s method of eidetic variation, arguing that eidetic variation plays a critical role in both (...) challenging and improving upon the eidetic results in phenomenology. More specifically, I argue that the self-correcting account of eidetic variation 1) is consistent with Husserl’s own formulations of his eidetic methodology and epistemic principles; 2) captures the dual epistemic function of eidetic variation as means for both testing and intuitively validating eidetic claims; and 3) offers methodological support for contemporary attempts to integrate eidetic variation with non-eidetic methods and resources. To substantiate these claims, I first contrast the self-correcting account with the falsificationist interpretations of eidetic variation. Then, I turn to three applications of eidetic variation in order to examine how eidetic phenomenology could draw from real-life deviations, artificial variations, and critical–historical reflection. The goal is to lay the methodological groundwork for a self-correcting and integrative account of eidetic variation and illustrate its usefulness in research practice. (shrink)

Robert Sugden argues that robustness analysis cannot play an epistemic role in grounding model-world relationships because the procedure is only a matter of comparing models with each other. We posit that this argument is based on a view of models as being surrogate systems in too literal a sense. In contrast, the epistemic importance of robustness analysis is easy to explicate if modelling is viewed as extended cognition, as inference from assumptions to conclusions. Robustness analysis is about assessing the reliability (...) of our extended inferences, and when our confidence in these inferences changes, so does our confidence in the results. Furthermore, we argue that Sugden’s inductive account relies tacitly on robustness considerations. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe distinction between minimal self and narrative self has gained ground in recent discussions of selfhood. In this article, this distinction is reassessed by analysing Zahavi and Gallagher’s account of selfhood and supplementing it with Husserl’s concept of person. I argue that Zahavi and Gallagher offer two compatible and complementary notions of self. Nevertheless, the relationship between minimal self and narrative self requires further clarification. Especially the embeddedness of self, the interplay between passivity and activity, and the problems of uniqueness (...) and persistence are better understood with Husserl’s analysis of person and its central concepts of position-taking, habitualities, and overall style. The embeddedness of self is elucidated by outlining how person is related to its environment, to other people, and to its past. This relational notion of self is both passively constituted and actively shaped: person mediates between minimal self characterized by perspectival ownership... (shrink)

Attachment theory proposes that the activation of the attachment system enacts emotion regulation (ER) to maintain security or cope with insecurity. However, the effects of ER on attachment states and their bidirectional influences remain poorly understood. In this ecological momentary assessment study, we examined the dynamics between attachment and ER. We hypothesised that attachment states and ER influence each other through time. Specifically, we hypothesised bidirectional short-term cycles between state attachment security and reappraisal, state attachment anxiety and rumination, and state (...) attachment avoidance and suppression. We also tested how trait attachment is related to state attachment and ER. One hundred twenty-two participants (Mage = 26.4) completed the Experiences in Close Relationship–Revised and reported state attachment and ER seven times daily for seven days. The results were only partly consistent with our cycle hypotheses yet revealed a cycle between low state attachment security and rumination that was attenuated by reappraisal. Moreover, rumination and suppression predicted increased insecure states, and reappraisal predicted increased secure and insecure states. Finally, trait attachment showed associations with state attachment and ER. Our study suggests regulatory dynamics between attachment and ER and opens important questions about their functional relationship in maintaining attachment-related behavioural patterns and emotional well-being. (shrink)

There is a long-standing tradition of questioning the viability and scientificity of first-person methods. Husserlian reflective methodology, in particular, has been challenged on the basis of its perceived inability to meet the standards of objectivity and reliability, leading to what has been called “phenomenological skepticism” ( Roy, 2007 ). In this article, I reassess this line of objection by outlining Daniel C. Dennett’s empirically driven skepticism and reconstructing his methodological arguments against Husserlian phenomenology. His ensuing phenomenological skepticism is divided into (...) strong skepticism and categorical and gradual versions of weak skepticism. Both strands of Dennett’s criticism are then countered by analyzing the key components of Husserl’s method of phenomenological reflection: epoché and transcendental reduction, intentional analysis, eidetic variation, and intersubjective validation. Laying out the basic features of phenomenological reflection serves two purposes. First, it undermines Dennett’s methodological arguments, which are based on the unfounded assumptions that Husserl is committed to introspection, methodological solipsism, the first-person-plural presumption, and the lone-wolf approach. Second, it shows how Husserl’s own methodology can alleviate the more justified empirical worries concerning overinterpretation, underdescription, and disagreement. Finally, I argue that gradual weak skepticism is the only plausible form of phenomenological skepticism and conclude that Husserlian methodology is well-equipped to combat it. (shrink)

This paper offers a new account of the epistemic significance of disagreement which is grounded in two assumptions; that knowledge is the norm of belief and, that the safety condition is a necessary condition for knowledge. These assumptions motivate a modal definition of epistemic peerhood, which is much easier to operate on than the more traditional definitions of epistemic peerhood. The modal account of the epistemic significance of disagreement yields plausible results regarding cases of disagreement. Furthermore, it is able to (...) tap into the intuitions that have motivated the conformist and the nonconformist positions and it locates a fruitful middle-ground between these two conflicting positions. It will be shown that the conformist is correct in that cases of real peer disagreement force us to suspend our judgment. The reason for this is that in cases of real peer disagreement our beliefs fail to be safe. The nonconformist, on the other hand, is right in that disagreement in itself does not have any epistemic power. It is only by the grace of nature that we gain knowledge. The fact that someone disagrees with you does not mean that you do not have knowledge. (shrink)

The main question of metasemantics, or foundational semantics, is why an expression token has the meaning (semantic value) that it in fact has. In his reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, Saul Kripke presented a skeptical challenge that threatened to make the foundational question unanswerable. My first contention in this paper is that the skeptical challenge indeed poses an insoluble paradox, but only for a certain kind of metasemantic theory, against which the challenge effectively works as a reductio ad absurdum (...) argument. My second contention is that as a result of rejecting the theory which entails a paradoxical outcome, we will see that the foundational question essentially involves a temporal dimension. After arguing that the skeptical challenge gives us a strong reason to adopt a historical view of meaning, I shall further argue against certain authors who claim that meanings not only have histories but futures as well, or that the meaning of a word may change retroactively in time as a consequence of counterfactual change in its future use. The major aim of the paper is thus to bring together the arguably interrelated debates about the skeptical challenge and temporal externalism in philosophy of language. (shrink)

One of the most important issues concerning the organization of research and higher education concerns their interaction. The most common form that this relationship of research and education takes in our time and age is to have both functions combined in universities, often referred to more specifically as research universities. This form of organization is more recent than one perhaps might first think, and even at this time there are exceptions to this form of organization. In natural sciences and medicine (...) there are industrial laboratories for research without teaching. In some countries, especially in Russia, there exists an extensive hierarchical institution almost entirely dedicated to research rather than teaching, called an academy of sciences. The members of such academies can devote themselves entirely to research without any teaching duties, except perhaps on the level of dissertation advising. Other exceptions include some rare graduate or research institutions, for instance Rockefeller University, All Souls College, Oxford, and some institutes of advanced study. But such exceptions are few and far between, at least in Western Europe and the Americas. Thus by far the most common relationship, especially in the humanities, of research and teaching is to have them conducted by the same people at the same institution, usually called a university. (shrink)

I LOGIC IN PHILOSOPHY— PHILOSOPHY OF LOGIC i. On the relation of logic to philosophy I n this book, the consequences of certain logical insights for ...

Research suggests that both childhood experiences with one’s parents and individual differences in effortful control contribute to adult emotion regulation (ER). However, it is unclear how they associate with specific ER processes. In this adult study, we examined the roles of recalled parenting experiences and effortful control in daily ER selection and implementation. Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), we focused on ER strategies of reappraisal, suppression, and rumination. We hypothesized recalled parental warmth, rejection, and overcontrol to predict adult ER selection (...) and effectiveness of ER implementation and effortful control to mediate these effects. One hundred twenty-two adults answered self-reported questionnaires on their childhood experiences with their parents and effortful control. In EMA, they reported ER and emotions seven times daily for seven days. Recalled parental warmth predicted less suppression and rumination, whereas recalled overcontrol, especially in fathers, predicted greater suppression and reappraisal. However, recalled parenting experiences did not predict the effectiveness of ER implementation, and no support was found for the mediating role of effortful control between recalled parenting experiences and ER. Our findings suggest that recalled parenting experiences may guide adult ER selection rather than shape ER implementation, and these links may be largely independent of their effortful control. (shrink)

Against some very common views (e.g. Dummett), this paper argues that Frege did not have a standard interpretation of higher-order logic and for this reason his programme in the foundations of mathematics was a nonstarter.

Several authors have recently argued that knowledge is not the aim of inquiry since it can make sense to inquire into a question even though one knows the answer. I argue that this a faulty diagnostic for determining whether one has met the constitutive standard of success of an activity type. The constitutive standards of success tell us when an activity is successful, but such standards can be exceeded and exceeding them can be reasonable. To back this up I develop (...) an account of zetetic supererogation and argue that subjects who continue to inquire into a question while knowing the answer do what is zetetically supererogatory. (shrink)

This paper provides an inferentialist account of model-based understanding by combining a counterfactual account of explanation and an inferentialist account of representation with a view of modeling as extended cognition. This account makes it understandable how the manipulation of surrogate systems like models can provide genuinely new empirical understanding about the world. Similarly, the account provides an answer to the question how models, that always incorporate assumptions that are literally untrue of the model target, can still provide factive explanations. Finally, (...) the paper shows how the contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation can provide tools for assessing the explanatory power of models. (shrink)

According to the causal-historical theory of reference, natural kind terms refer in virtue of complicated causal relations the speakers have to their environment. A common objection to the theory is that purely causal relations are insufficient to fix reference in a determinate fashion. The so-called hybrid view holds that what is also needed for successful fixing are true descriptions associated in the mind of the speaker with the referent. The main claim of this paper is that the objection fails: reference (...) fixing of natural kind terms can be purely causal. The main argument draws inspiration from recent theoretical advances made in metaphysics of kinds by Marion Godman, Antonella Mallozzi, and David Papineau. The main claim is that their notion of super-explanatory properties may explain how reference of many kind terms can be fixed purely causally. (shrink)

Several of the so-called “fallacies” in Aristotle are not in fact mistaken inference-types, but mistakes or breaches of rules in the questioning games which were practiced in the Academy and in the Lyceum. Hence the entire Aristotelian theory of “fallacies” ought to be studied by reference to the author's interrogative model of inquiry, based on his theory of questions and answers, rather than as a part of the theory of inference. Most of the “fallacies” mentioned by Aristotle can in fact (...) be diagnosed by means of the interrogative model, including petitio principii, multiple questions, “babbling’, etc., and so can Aristotle's alleged anticipation of the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem. The entire Aristotelian conception of inquiry is an interrogative one. Deductive conclusions caught Aristotle's attention in the form of answers that every rational interlocutor must give, assuming only his own earlier answers. Several features of Aristotle's methodology can be understood by means of the interrogative model, including the role of endoxa in it. Theoretically, there is also considerable leeway as to whether “fallacies” are conceived of as mistakes in questioning or as breaches of the rules that govern questioning games. (shrink)

Ideally, governing institutions would be designed so that they would produce and implement with certainty ‘human rights-compatible budgets’, i.e. budgets that adequately reflect the obligations enshrined in human rights. However, there are various reasons why a government may ultimately fail to produce such budgets. This article focuses on under-examined challenges for budgeting for human rights: epistemically oriented challenges. More specifically, the article engages in ‘horizon scanning’, and it maps key underlying factors that can be conducive to epistemically oriented challenges to (...) produce and implement human rights-compatible budgets. In addition, the article considers the road ahead from the perspective of institutional design. (shrink)

Odenbaugh and Alexandrova provide a challenging critique of the epistemic benefits of robustness analysis, singling out for particular criticism the account we articulated in Kuorikoski et al.. Odenbaugh and Alexandrova offer two arguments against the confirmatory value of robustness analysis: robust theorems cannot specify causal mechanisms and models are rarely independent in the way required by robustness analysis. We address Odenbaugh and Alexandrova’s criticisms in order to clarify some of our original arguments and to shed further light on the properties (...) of robustness analysis and its epistemic rationale. (shrink)

I n order to appreciate properly what we are doing in this book it is necessary to realize that our approach to linguistic theorizing differs from the prevailing views. Our approach can be described by indicating what distinguishes it from the methodological ideas current in theoretical linguistics, which I consider seriously misguided. Linguists typically construe their task in these days as that of making exceptionless generalizations from particular examples. This explanatory strategy is wrong in several different ways. It presupposes that (...) we can have "intuitions" about particular examples, usually examples invented by the linguist himself or herself, reliable and sharp enough to serve as a basis of sharp generalizations. It also presupposes that we cannot have equally reliable direct access to general linguistic regularities. Both assumptions appear to me extremely dubious, and the first of them has in effect been challenged by linguists like Dwight Bol inger. There is also some evidence that the degree of unanimity among linguists is fairly low when it comes to less clear cases, even in connection with such relatively simple questions as grammaticality (acceptability). For this reason we have tried to rely more on quotations from contemporary fiction, newspapers and magazines than on linguists' and philosophers' ad hoc examples. I also find it strange that some of the same linguists as believe that we all possess innate ideas about general characteristics of humanly possible grammars assume that we can have access to them only via their particular consequences. (shrink)

According to Kant, “mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.” In this paper, I shall make a few suggestions as to how this characterization of the mathematical method is to be understood.