[lit-ideas] WHAT???

  • From: Adriano Palma <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 06:39:18 +0000

Only human scum does not quote grice, grice is good for anything

From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Donal McEvoy
Sent: 18 August 2015 08:34
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Hintikkiana

Aside from the number of times Grice pops up, I was also struck by this in JLS'
outline of Hintikka's _Schlipp_ volume:

Epistemology, for Hintikka, is epistemics, i.e. epistemic logic. And right
he is!>

Unless Popper and others are right, and "epistemic logic" is an irrelevance and
part of the "subjectivist blunder" of JTB-theory, to be replaced with an
understanding of "objective knowledge". In this latter conception, human
knowledge is distinct from animal knowledge where it formulates
knowledge-claims so that they have an "objective" W3 status beyond the W2
belief-states and processes of the knower: what underlies the runaway success
of human knowledge, compared with animal knowledge, is how this objectification
of knowledge as W3 content permits us to examine and develop that content
critically and in ways not available where "knowledge" is merely a subjective
state or process (as it is for other animals). This runaway success is perhaps
best exemplified by scientific knowledge, and "epistemic logic" proves an
irrelevance to understanding scientific knowledge.

D




On Tuesday, 18 August 2015, 3:24,
"dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>"
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:

For the record, a commentary on the volume in the "Library of Living
Philosophers" series on Hintikka.



THE PHILOSOPHY OF JAAKO HINTIKKA
This is VOLUME 30.

While his full name was K. J. J. H., Hintikka went most of the time by
Jaakko.

Hintikka is recognized as one of the handful of most creative,
comprehensive, and rigorous philosophical minds.

His major contributions to philosophy range over a very wide area, most
conspicuously:

-- logic
-- epistemology
-- philosophy of science
-- history of philosophy.

In this celebration, twenty-seven philosophers expound and criticise
aspects of Hintikka's though, and he responds directly to each one of them with
elegance and precision.

The volume also contains Hintikka's intellectual autobiography, as well as
a comprehensive, up-to-date bibliography of all his published work.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Jaako Hintikka: Intellectual Autobiography


ESSAY I:

Simo Knuuttila: Hintikka's View of the History of Philosophy

---- What are Hintikka's views on the history of philosophy? He seems to
have had a fascination (via his mentor, von Wright, for Witters, but he also
liked Aristotle, and always enjoyed the work of Grice who was the cynosure
of everyone while Hintikka was at Harvard.

ESSAY II:

Gabriel Motzkin: Hintikka's Ideas About the History of Ideas

"The History of Ideas" is a chair in Oxford once held by Berlin. By "Ideas"
we mean "Ideology". Not any idea does. "It was Joe's idea to do it" does
not form part of the history of ideas, but Jefferson's views were.

ESSAY III:

Juliet Floyd:

On the Use and Abuse of Logic in Philosophy: Kant, Frege, and Hintikka on
the Verb "To Be"

--- This relates to the essay by Grice on "Aristotle on the multiplicity of
being". Grice, against G. E. L. Owen ("The snares of ontology") thinks
that 'be' is uniguous. But Grice distinguishes between:

(a) Socrates izz rational.

and

(b) Socrates hazz a flat nose.

Both come up as 'is' in Aristotle, but they shouldn't!

ESSAY IV: Judson C. Webb: Hintikka on Aristotelian Constructions, Kantian
Intuitions, and Peircean Theorems

This is a comprehensive view of Hintikka's take on Aristotle, Kant and
Peirce. I think he preferred Aristotle of all, and his last volume of Selected
Papers is dedicated to Aristotle.

ESSAY V:

R.M. Dancy: Hintikka, Aristotle, and Existence

This overlaps a bit with Essay III. "Existentia" is not a word Aristotle
would use. He would use 'ousia'. Hintikka distinguishes between 'existence'
(not a predicate for Kant) and essence.

ESSAY VI:

Aaron Garrett: The Method of the Analyst

Hintikka is, like Grice, an analytic philosopher; but unlike Grice,
Hintikka skips 'linguistic botanising' and goes straight to formalism.

ESSAY VII:

Karl-Otto Apel: Speculative-Hermeneutic Remarks on Hintikka's Performatory
Interpretation of Descartes's Cogito, Ergo Sum

By 'performatory', Apel means 'performative' which is a lexical item J. L.
Austin borrowed (but never returned from Scots law: 'operative'). The idea
is that when Descartes said what he did in French he was doing things with
words. Some have argued, wrongly, that performatives are neither true nor
false, and Hintikka thinks this may shed light on what Descartes actually
DID with his words.

ESSAY VIII:


Dagfinn Follesdal: Hintikka On Phenomenology

Phenomenology is not supposed to be analytic philosophy, but continental
philosophy. The fat that Follesdal, who taught with Hintikka at Stanford,
thinks that what Hintikka (an analytic philosopher) says about phenomenology
(a branch of continental philosophy) is important goes to show how arbitrary
(contra Woody Allen's recent film, "Irrational man", after book by
Barrett) can be.

ESSAY IX:

David Pears: Private Language

D. F. Pears with collaborator with H. P. Grice on work in the philosophy of
action. A student at Christ Church (the most prestigious college in
Oxford), Pears knows what he is saying. Robinson Crusoe did have a private
language, UNTIL HE MET FRIDAY.

ESSAY X

Mathieu Marion: Phenomenological Language, Thoughts, and Operations in the
Tractatus

Hintikka had, via von Wright, a fascination for the three Witters: the
first Witters of the Tractatus, the middle Witters, and the latter Witters.
Operations is a key concept in the early Witters as Marion shows, and he
learned this from Hintikka.

Essay XI:

Raymond M. Smullyan: A Logical Miscellany

By 'miscellany', Smullyan means a mischmasch. He learned this from
Hintikka.

ESSAY XII:

Solomon Feferman: What Kind of Logic Is "Independence Friendly" Logic?

We speak of X-friendly figuratively. Logic is not friendly, since only
persons are friendly. A logician may be friendy. So a logician who is
independence-friendly is possibly revolutionary, so beware! (Hintikka was one!)

ESSAY XIII:

Johan Van Benthem: The Epistemic Logic of IF Games

Grice laughed at Strawson's account of 'if', for Strawson thought that he
was doing first-rate ordinary language philosophy (in "Introduction to
Logical Theory") and laughed at the fact that logicians's 'if' has NOTHING to
do
with HIS use of 'if'. Hintikka underestimates this polemic and bases his
games on 'if' -- as a background for his epistemic logic.

ESSAY XIV

Wilfrid Hodges: The Logic of Quantifiers

Hodges wrote a nice little volume on Logic for Penguin. Hintikka was
obsessed with quantifiers: any, each, all. He noted that they can NOT all be
symbolised, as Grice thinks, by (x). "Each clown can be funny". But this does
not implicate that "ALL" clows are funny, let alone that "any clown is
funny" or "every clown is funny". In fact, it may well be that NO clown is
funny.

ESSAY XV:

Gabriel Sandu: Hintikka and the Fallacies of the New Theory of Reference

By the New Theory of Reference we mean Ruth Barcan Marcus and Saul Kripke.
Hintikka thought it was plagued with fallacies. This gave Dennett the idea
to coin 'hintikka': "We discussed all night, but that did not lead me to
change ONE hintikka about stuff".

ESSAY XVI

James Higginbotham: The Scope Hypothesis

This is a very important philosopher. Some say that Higginbotham is no
philosopher, but a linguist, but Hintikka sometimes felt himself honoured that
he was being treated seriously be linguists! The scope hypothesis
fascinated Grice. He developed two theories to deal with it: the subscript
device,
in "Vacuous Names" (in Davidson/Hintikka, "Words and Objections) and the
square-bracket device: e.g. "[The king of France] is not bald." IMPLICATES
there is a king of France and we write that between square bracket and thus
make it immune to criticism: a presupposition alla Collingwood. This allows
Grice to avoid problems with truth-value gaps.

ESSAY XVII

Hans Sluga: Jaakko Hintikka (and Others) on Truth

Sluga is credited by Grice in "Presupposition and Conversational
Implicature" for his help in analysing "the king of France is bald". Sluga,
unlike
Hintikka, was Oxonian-educated.

ESSAY XVIII:

Pascal Engel: Is Truth Effable?

Engel is playing on Witters for whom truth like the naming of cats is
ineffable.

Engel (not to be confused with the plural Engels, a dangerous philosopher)
betwen:

i. truth is effable.
ii. truth is ineffable
iii. truth is effanineffable.

Witters would have thought that truth was effanineffable, but G. E. M.
Anscombe found that hard to translate.

ESSAY XIX:

Jan Wolenski: Tarskian and Post-Tarskian Truth

If Popper learned from Tarksi while seating on a bench in Vienna, Hintikka
didn't.

ESSAY XX:

Philippe De Rouilhan and Serge Bozon: The Truth of IF: Has Hintikka Really
Exorcised Tarski's Curse?

D. M. S. Edginton, once professor of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford,
held that 'if' sentences do not have truth values. Tarski was known to curse
in Polish (his native language). You make the connections. For the
exorcising of curses vide Geary, "Secret Papers".

Essay XXI

Martin Kusch: Hintikka on Heidegger and the Universality of Language

For Heidegger German was a universal language; for Hintikka Finnish was a
universal language. For Kusch both were!

ESSAY XXII

Patrick Suppes: Hintikka's Generalizations of Logic and their Relation to
Science

Suppes taught with Hinitkka at Stanford. Logic ain't science and science
ain't logic. Logicians play with silly examples like "All ravens are black".
Scientists, unless you are a biologist (and play with "Some ravens are
albino"), don't.


ESSAY XXIII

Isaac Levi: Induction, Abduction, and Oracles

Hintikka delivered the second von Wright lecture on induction. Ab-duction
was of course a coinage by Peirce. Oracles were heard at Delphi. Levi makes
all the proper connections in connection with the War of the Peloponnesus.

ESSAY XXIV

Risto Hilpinen: Jaakko Hintikka on Epistemic Logic and Epistemology

Perhaps the most quoted essay by Hintikka is his essay on knowledge, for
which he uses the symbol "K", as in KAP, KKAP. The second reads that A knows
that he knows that p.

Epistemology, for Hintikka, is epistemics, i.e. epistemic logic. And right
he is!

ESSAY XV

Matti Sintonen: From the Logic of Questions to the Logic of Inquiry

Questions and inquiry have been related since Hobbes. For Hobbes, the
scientist asks questions to Nature, and Nature never lies.

ESSAY XVI

Theo A.F. Kuipers: Inductive Aspects of Confirmation, Information, and
Content

Hintikka, unlike Popper, was stuck with induction. But also with
confirmation, information, and content. He was so much into content that Dennett
coined 'hintikka' to refer to a belief that varies infinitesimally from
another.

ESSAY XVII

Michael Meyer: Questioning Art

The sad thing is that it's artist (notably Andy Warhol) who first and
foremost question art, when they should just sell it!

The volume concludes with a Bibliography of the Writings of Jaakko Hintikka

Cheers,

Speranza



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