Brian Leiter alerts us that Jaakko Hintikka is this year’s recipient of the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy. As I’ve discussed a while back, this prize is as close as we get to a Nobel Prize in Semantics.

Here’s the official blurb on Hintikka from the Swedish Academic:

Jaakko Hintikka was one of the philosophers who established “possible world” semantics for modal logic. This form of semantics is an attempt to improve our understanding of modal concepts, in the first place concepts like “necessary” and “possible” but also concepts like “knowledge”, “belief”, “ought”, “right” and “wrong”. Hintikka’s system is based on the concept of a “model set”, that is, a set of sentences that may be understood as a partial description of a possible world. In his semantics, systems of such model sets are investigated. Hintikka has applied his semantics to many different fields. His semantic analysis of the concepts of “knowledge” and “belief” has led to what was later called epistemic logic, which has been highly influential, both within and outside philosophy. For example, it is of fundamental importance for pioneering work in datalogy#1 and game theory.

Jaakko Hintikka, born on 2 January 1929 at Vantaa, Finland (Finnish and American [?] citizen). He has been a professor at Helsinki University, Finland’s Academy and Florida State University. Between 1965 and 1982 he was also on the staff of Stanford University. Since 1990 he has been a professor at Boston University. He is an honorary doctor of several universities and recently a whole volume in the exclusive series Library of Living Philosophers was devoted to him.

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