Is a genuine logic of scientific discovery possible? In the essays collected here, Hintikka not only defends an affirmative answer; he also outlines such a logic. It is the logic of questions and answers. Thus inquiry in the sense of knowledge-seeking becomes inquiry in the sense of interrogation. Using this new logic, Hintikka establishes a result that will undoubtedly be considered the fundamental theorem of all epistemology, viz., the virtual identity of optimal strategies of pure discovery with optimal deductive strategies. Questions to Nature, of course, must include...

Aristotle thought of his logic and methodology as applications of the Socratic questioning method. In particular, logic was originally a study of answers necessitated by earlier answers. For Aristotle, thought-experiments were real experiments in the sense that by realizing forms in one's mind, one can read off their properties and interrelations. Treating forms as independent entities, knowable one by one, committed Aristotle to his mode of syllogistic explanation. He did not think of existence, predication and identity as separate senses of estin. Aristotle thus serves as an...

Knowledge and Belief
An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions
by Jaakko Hintikka

Prepared by Vincent F. Hendricks & John Symons


In 1962 Jaakko Hintikka published Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction
to the Logic of the Two Notions with Cornell University Press. Almost
every paper or a book on epistemic and doxastic logic that has appeared
since then has referred to this seminal work. Although many philosophers
working in logic, epistemology, game-theory, economics, computer science
and linguistics mention the book, it is very likely that most have never
literally had their hands on...

It is gratifying to see that philosophers' continued interest in Words and Objections has been so strong as to motivate a paperback edition. This is gratifying because it vindicates the editors' belief in the permanent im- portance of Quine's philosophy and in the value of the papers com- menting on it which were collected in our volume. Apart from a couple of small corrections, only one change has been made. The list of Professor Quine's writings has been brought up to date. The editors cannot claim any credit for this improvement, however. We have not tried to imitate the Library of Living...

The papers collected in this volume were written over a period of some eight or nine years, with some still earlier material incorporated in one of them. Publishing them under the same cover does not make a con- tinuous book of them. The papers are thematically connected with each other, however, in a way which has led me to think that they can naturally be grouped together. In any list of philosophically important concepts, those falling within the range of application of modal logic will rank high in interest. They include necessity, possibility, obligation, permission, knowledge, belief,...

In the last 25 years, the concept of information has played a crucial role in communication theory, so much so that the terms information theory and communication theory are sometimes used almost interchangeably. It seems to us, however, that the notion of information is also destined to render valuable services to the student of induction and probability, of learning and reinforcement, of semantic meaning and deductive inference, as well as of scientific method in general. The present volume is an attempt to illustrate some of these uses of information concepts. In 'On Semantic Information'...

As official sponsors of the First International Conference in the History and Philosophy of Science, the two Divisions of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science owe a great deal to the University of Jyvliskyla and the 1973 Jyvliskylli Summer Festival for the extra- ordinarily generous hospitality they provided. But there is an additional debt owed, not simply for the locale but for the very substance of the Conference, to the two Finnish scholars who have jointly authored the present volume. For this volume represents not only the first part of the published...

Proceedings of the Fourth Scandinavian Logic Symposium and of the First Soviet-Finnish Logic Conference, Jyvaskyla, Finland, June 29-July 6, 1976.

This book is a collection of studies applying game-theoretical concepts and ideas to analysing the semantics of natural language and some formal languages. The bulk of the book consists of several papers by Hintikka, Carlson and Saarinen and discusses several of the central problems of the semantics of natural language.

The topics covered are the semantics of natural language quantifiers, conditionals, pronouns and anaphora more generally. Hintikka s famous essay presenting examples of "branching quantifier structures" in English, as well as one formulating his "any-every thesis,"...

The two volumes to which this is a preface consist of the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on History and Philosophy of Science. The Conference was organized by the Joint Commission of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science (IUHPS) of the IUHPS, the Italian Society for Logic and under the auspices Philosophy of Science, and the Domus Galilaeana of Pisa, headed by Professor Vincenzo Cappelletti. Domus GaIilaeana also served as the host institution, with some help from the University of Pisa. The Conference took place in Pisa, Italy, on September 4-8,...