Merrill B. Hintikka

Is Alethic Modal Logic Possible

The title of my paper may appear paradoxical, misplaced, or even worse, out of date. The possibility of a reasonable modal logic was denied by Quine on philosophical grounds, but his objections have been dead for a while, even though they have not yet been completely buried.1 What has made a crucial difference is the development of what has generally been taken to be a viable semantics (model theory) for modal logic.2 This semantics has provided a basis from which Quine’s objections can apparently be answered satisfactorily and which yields a solid foundation for the different axiom systems for modal logic. Thus the question of the possibility of modal logic has apparently been disposed of for good, and my title question accordingly may seem pointless.

Questioning as a Philosophical Method

Questioning is not only an important philosophical method; it offers a useful model for many different types of knowledge-seeking. For the time being, I shall in fact treat questioning as a process of information-gathering in general. Only later, once the structure of information-seeking by questioning has been discussed, can we see how variants of this method are particularly adept to serve the purposes of philosophical thinking.

Towards a General Theory of Individuation and Identification

The most important recent development that falls within the scope of this meeting, “Language and Ontology”, is the somewhat amorphous body of ideas, conceptualizations, and results which is best known aspossible-worlds semantics.1 Its eminence is well founded. We consider it as self-evident as anything in philosophy that one cannot do justice to actual human experience without a conceptual system that includes possibilia. It does not suffice to speak of different objects, different properties, different relations, etc.; at some point we also have to speak of different things that can happen or could have happened. To put the same point in more vivid terms, our life is intrinsically and inevitably acted against a backdrop of unrealized possibilities. Jaakko Hintikka has articulated this idea by connecting the use of unrealized possibilia with the concept of intentionality in which several philosophers, notably Husserl, have seen the gist of human thinking, and outlined a theory of intentionality based on this relationship.2

How Can Language be Sexist

Prima facie, our title question may seem pointless. Barring bigots, virtually everybody will agree that language is frequently used in a sexist way. Why, then, the question?

Situations, Possible Worlds, and Attitudes

I once read about a cannibal tribe in which nobody could become a chieftain without disposing of one of the earlier ones and eating him. It seems to me sometimes that philosophers must be descendants of that tribe. When a philosopher develops a new theory, it almost invariably seems more important to him to use it to try to clobber an earlier one rather than to try to see if the two are perhaps complementary — and to see what there is, perhaps, to be learned from the earlier theory.

On Sense, Reference, and the Objects of Knowledge

The problems which are discussed by Frege in “On Sense and Reference” and to which he proposes a solution in that famous paper might seem to be of interest primarily to philosophers of language and to logicians. It is not hard to see, however, that they are also of an intensive interest to epistemologists. They are highly relevant to a problem which has not (it seems to me) received its fair share of epistemologists’ attention. This is the problem of the objects of knowledge. Moreover, both Frege’s discussion and my criticism of it can be extended to other epistemologically important concepts, including belief, memory, and thinking.

On denoting what

Russell put forward his 1905 theory of denoting on the basis of evidence which he said is “derived from the difficulties which seem unavoidable if we regard denoting phrases as standing for the genuine constituents of the propositions in whose verbal expressions they occur.”1 What are these difficulties? In developing his theory of sense and reference, Frege had discussed the failure of the substitutivity of identity (SI) in intensional context and the related problem of why identity-statements can be informative. Russell discussed both these problems, but at the same time he broadened the range of paradigmatic semantical problems to also include the problem of empty terms, which can, among other things, manifest itself in the form of a failure of existential generalization (EG) in intensional contexts.