Jaakko Hintikka

Jaakko Hintikka (1929– ) is a Finnish logician and philosopher, and professor of philosophy at Boston University.

Epistemic Logic

Hintikka presented a method of doing epistemic logic, a contextual logic meant to symbolize sentences about knowledge and belief. In his 1962 book Knowledge and Belief, he provides new operators which closely resemble those of modal logic:

• K_a := a knows that…
• P_a := It is possible, for all a knows, that…
• B_a := a believes that…
• C_a := It is compatible with everything a knows that…

Selected Works

• Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions (1962)
• Models for Modalities (1969)
• The Logic of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Logic (1989)
• The Philosophy of Mathematics Revisted (1996)