Jaakko Hintikka and Information in Philosophy

Though not something that I deliberately worked towards, I realise that much of the work I have done or am doing is in areas either initiated or influenced by Jaakko Hintikka.

  • My honours thesis looked at game-theoretical semantics and independence-friendly logic, which Hintikka is the main architect of.
  • I also work with epistemic logic quite a bit, of which Hintikka’s Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions is a seminal text.
  • I am currently using Hintikka’s approach to analysing questions as requests for information in terms of epistemic modal logic for some research on informational relevance.
  • The approaches to truthlikeness that I am using for information quantification make use of Hintikka’s distributive normal forms.
  • The work by Bar-Hillel/Carnap on quantifying semantic information was extended by Hintikka.

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Talk on a Logic for Agent-Oriented Relevance

Details for an upcoming talk I am giving:

Title: A Logic for Agent-Oriented Relevance

Abstract: Relevance here is taken to be agent-oriented/epistemic, where the relevance of a piece of information is determined in terms of how well it satisfies an agent’s request, how well it answers their question. A logic is given in which a relevance operator (Ra) is defined and investigated; Rai means something like ‘the piece of information i is relevant to agent a’. The erotetic foundation for this logic is Hintikka’s approach to analysing questions as requests for information in terms of epistemic modal logic, which is then combined with a logic of intention.

Location: Melbourne University Logic Seminar Series, September 17th.