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Hintikka, Jaakko On Proper (Popper) and Improper Uses of Information in Epistemology 1993 ###
Hintikka, Jaakko On Proper (Popper) and Improper Uses of Information in Epistemology 1993 ###
Hintikka, Jaakko On Proper (Popper) and Improper Uses of Information in Epistemology 1993 ###
JAAKKO HINTIKKA
Boston University
’ There exists a rich flora of other uses of the term “information”. None of the
other senses have as close relationship to the pragmatic role of information, how-
ever. For a taxonomy of some of the other senses, see Nauta, D., The Meaning of
Information, Hague: Mouton, 1992.
Cf. here my forthcoming article on epistemic logic in the Routledge Encyclopedia
of Philosophy.
This point can be put into a deeper perspective. A distinction can be made-and
ought to be made-between two kinds of rules (or principles) in any strategic ac-
tivity like knowledge-seeking. On the one hand you have the rules that define the
game, e.g. how chessmen are moved on a board. They can be called definitory rules.
They must be distinguished from rules, including rules of thumb, that deal with
what is better and what is worse in the “game” in question. Definitory rules do not
say anything about this subject. Rules which do can be called strategic rules. Now
rules for belief change are clearly strategic rather than definitory rules in the game
of information-seeking. As such, they are more complex than any “semantic” defi-
nition of information in terms of excluded alternatives. For we know from game
theory that utilities are in principle associated with entire strategies, not with indi-
vidual moves.
160 JAAKKO HINTIKKA
Here the reader’s first reaction undoubtedly is: Who ever thought
otherwise? The answer is: Lots of philosophers have done so. For
instance, Ian Hacking has claimed that Carnap’s inductive logic and
by implication Carnap’s use of the notion of information is predi-
cated on thinking in terms of the state of the entire world.s The same
vision is reflected in philosophers’ megalomaniac terminology of
“possible worlds”. For a long time I interpreted such terminology
as metaphoric, perhaps mediated by Jimmy Savage’s neat locution
“small worlds” in speaking of what I took the intended applications
of “possible-worlds semantics” to be.6 Only gradually have I come
to realize to my considerable consternation that the likes of David
Lewis7and Alvin Plantingas are taking the metaphor literally.
Meanwhile I have realized the source of the “universalist” view
in epistemology. It is the idea that our language has to be inter-
preted once and for all, so that whenever we are speaking of any-
thing at all, we are indirectly speaking of e~erything.~ Quantifiers
have on this view only one range, viz. everything. This was Frege’s
explicit view, and he was not the only one who had the courage of
his prejudices-or at least of his overall vision of language and its
relation to the world. I have examined this view which can be called
the idea of language as the universal medium, and with an unwit-
ting pun I have sometimes called it the universalist view of
See Hacking, I., “The Leibniz-Carnap Program for Inductive Logic”, The Jour-
nal of PhiIosophy, 68, 1971, pp. 597410.
Savage, L. J., The Foundations of Statistics, New York: John Wiley, 1954, espe-
cially pp. 82-9 1.
’ Lewis, D., On the Plurality of Worlds, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
* Plantinga, A., The Nature of Necessity, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
Cf. van Heijenoort, J., “Logic as Language and Logic as Calculus”, Synthese,
17, 1967, pp. 324-330; Hintikka, J., “On the Development of the Model-Theoreti-
cal Viewpoint in Logical Theory”, Synthese, 77, 1988, pp. 1-36; Kusch, M., Lan-
guage as Calculus vs. Language as Universal Medium, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic,
1989.
ON PROPER (POPPER?) AND IMPROPER USES OF INFORMATION 161
lo E.g. by Cohen, L. J., The Probable and the Provable, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1911.
' I Carnap, R., The Continuum of Inductive Methods, Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1952.
162 JAAKKO HlNTlKKA
Iz Cf. here Walk, K., “Simplicity, Entropy and Inductive Logic”, Aspects of induc-
tive Logic, Hintikka, J. and Suppes, P., eds., Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1966, pp.
6680.
l 3 See here Hintikka, J., “A Two-Dimensional Continuum of Inductive Methods”,
op. cit. note 12 above, pp. 113-132; Hintikka, J. and Niiniluoto, I., “An Axiomatic
Foundation for the Logic of Inductive Generalization”, Studies in inductive Logic
and Probability i I , Jeffrey, R. C., ed., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1980, pp. 157-181.
ON PROPER (POPPER?)AND IMPROPER USES OF INFORMATION 163
philosophy of ~cience.’~Such second-order probabilities can inter
alia govern the rational change of indexes of caution like Car-
nap’s A.
like Isaac Levi.” Personally, I believe that there still are plenty of
unused opportunities in this direction, even though I will not try
to expound them here.
It is nevertheless important to realize that in this way we cannot
hope to find one single epistemologically or logically privileged
method of scientific or more generally speaking epistemological
inference. For the probabilities needed cannot according to (4) be
known fully a priori.