John Symons

This volume gathers together essays from some of Hintikka’s colleagues and former students exploring his influence on their work and pursuing some of the insights that we have found in his work. This book includes a comprehensive overview of Hintikka’s philosophy by Dan Kolak and John Symons and an annotated bibliography of Hintikka’s work. Table of Contents: Foreword; Daniel Kolak and John Symons. Hintikka on Epistemological Axiomatizations; Vincent F. Hendricks. Hintikka on the Problem with the Problem of Transworld Identity; Troy Catterson. What is Epistemic Discourse About? Radu J. Bogdan. Interrogative Logic and the Economic Theory of Information; Raymond Dacey. A Metalogical Critique of Wittgensteinian ‘Phenomenology’; William Boos. Theoretical Commensurability By Correspondence Relations: When Empirical Success Implies Theoretical Reference; Gerhard Schurz. What is Abduction?: An Assessment of Jaakko Hintikka's Conception; James H. Fetzer. The dialogic of just being different: Hintikka's new approach to the notion of episteme and its impact on 'second generation' dialogics; Shahid Rahman. Probabilistic Features in Logic Games; Johan F. A. K. van Benthem. On Some Logical Properties of ‘Is True’; Jan Wolenski. The Results are in: The Scope and Import of Hintikka's Philosophy; Daniel Kolak and John Symons. Annotated Bibliography of Jaakko Hintikka. Index.

The analytic tradition is sometimes criticized as being narrowly focused on language, logic or conceptual analysis to the detriment of deeper investigations into ontological, metaphysical or moral questions.1 More specifically, analytic philosophy has been associated with a positivist attitude which favored replacing the philosophy’s traditional focus on fundamental questions with an obsequiously deferential relationship to mathematics and the natural sciences. While this line of criticism obscures the historical reality and contemporary diversity of the analytic tradition, it is certainly true that analytic philosophers have generated severe criticisms of traditional metaphysics.

Intuition serves a variety of roles in contemporary philosophy. This paper provides a historical discussion of the revival of intuition in the 1970s, untangling some of the ways that intuition has been used and offering some suggestions concerning its proper place in philosophical investigation. Contrary to some interpretations of the results of experimental philosophy, it is argued that generalized skepticism with respect to intuition is unwarranted. Intuition can continue to play an important role as part of a methodologically conservative stance towards philosophical investigation. I argue that methodological conservatism should be sharply distinguished from the process of evaluating individual propositions. Nevertheless, intuition is not always a reliable guide to truth and experimental philosophy can serve a vital ameliorative role in determining the scope and limits of our intuitive competence with respect to various areas of inquiry.