While various strategic business issues related to product design have been explored by academicians and practitioners, one issue has largely been ignored: how do financial markets assess and evaluate companies’ product design? The purpose of this article is to examine this issue, especially when it comes to the assessments and evaluations made by the most essential actors of contemporary financial markets: investment analysts and institutional investors. I develop propositions concerning the product design-related evaluative schemes and heuristics used by the financial (...) market actors in evaluating companies as investment opportunities. I illustrate my propositions with examples from, e.g., the mobile phone industry as well as with interview excerpts from interviews with investment analysts and institutional investors. Propositions are provided both for assessments of companies’ individual end products (‘design as the end product’ perspective) and for assessments of companies’ design capabilities (‘design as a capability’ perspective). In essence, the propositions highlight that the evaluative schemes used by financial market actors are partly rational, yet involve biases and are likely to lead to overvaluation and undervaluation of certain kinds of product designs by certain kinds of companies. Thus, even from the perspective of profit-maximization, many of the evaluative schemes of the financial market actors are, at most, quasi-rational. Moreover, the evaluative schemes of the financial market actors may motivate company managers to pursue certain kinds of product design rather than others—and may even lead to self-reinforcing (vicious or virtuous) circles of certain kinds of product designs being advocated. (shrink)

An evening discussion between professors Jaakko Hintikka and Simo Knuuttila on September 2, 2007, at the Helsinki conference: Knuuttila: Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for inviting us to this event and for this opportunity to discuss the latest volume of the Library of Living Philosophers, which was published last spring. The title of the volume is “The Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka”. Probably most people here know this series, which was founded in 1939 by P. A. Schilpp. The idea (...) of the volumes is to invite some prominent philosophers to describe their lives and ideas and then ask other philosophers to write and comment on topics which the first author has written about. Then the philosopher to whom the book is dedicated answers and discusses these other people’s papers about his or her philosophy. These volumes gradually became a very popular series which most philosophical libraries wanted to have. It was considered such a good idea, giving rise to one of the most prestigious series in philosophy. It is also considered as a kind of philosophical honor for the philosopher to be chosen to be among these living philosophers. The books always have the same structure; first, an intellectual autobiography, pretty extensive, then the papers on the basic author’s philosophy and, last, the papers are answered separately. So there is a kind of discussion going on. The book on Jaakko Hintikka’s philosophy consists of almost 1000 pages. It is also available as a paperback. Now, I have prepared some questions. (shrink)

Jaakko Hintikka was born on January 12th, 1929. He received his doctorate from the University of Helsinki under the supervision of Professor G. H. von Wright at the age of 24 in 1953. Hintikka was appointed Professor of philosophy at the University of Helsinki in 1959. Since the late 50s, he has shared his time between Finland and the U.S.A. He was appointed Professor of philosophy at Stanford University in 1964. As from 1970 Hintikka has been permanent research professor (...) of the Academy of Finland. He has published 13 books and about 200 articles, not to mention the various editorial and organizational activities he has played an active role in. The present collection of essays has been edited to honour Jaakko Hintikka on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. By dedicating a Festschrift to Jaakko Hintikka, the contributors wish to pay homage to this remarkable man whom they see not only as a scholar of prodigious energy and insight, but as a friend, colleague and former teacher. The contributors hope the essays collected here will bring pleasure to the man they are intended to honour. All of the essays touch upon topics Hintikka has taken an direct or indirect interest in, ranging from technical problems of mathematical logic and applications of formal methods through philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and history of philosophy to philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

According to the safety condition, a subject knows that p only if she would believe that p only if p was true. The safety condition has been a very popular necessary condition for knowledge of late. However, it is well documented that the safety condition is trivially satisfied in cases where the subject believes in a necessary truth. This is for the simple reason that a necessary truth is true in all possible worlds, and therefore it is true in all (...) possible worlds where it is believed. But clearly, all beliefs concerning necessary truths do not amount to knowledge. The safety theorists have attempted to deal with the problem caused by necessary truths by restricting the safety condition to purely contingent truths and by globalizing the safety condition to a set of propositions. Both of these solutions are problematic. The principal aim of this paper is to develop a version of the safety condition that is able to deal with cases featuring necessary truths. (shrink)

In Jaakko Hintikka's interrogative model of inquiry, the strategic principles governing empirical inquiry turn out to be closely related to those governing deductive reasoning. Hence it is important to study the precise analogies which obtain between deductive logic and interrogative inquiry. The basic concept of the interrogative model is the relation of model consequence $\text{M}\colon \text{T}\vdash \text{C}$. It is said to obtain iff C can be derived from T by means of an interrogative process in the model M. We (...) prove here a counterpart of Craig 's interpolation theorem for the concept of model consequence. The interrogative analogue to definability is a logical generalization of methodologists' concept of identifiability. For this concept, we prove an analogue to Beth's theorem. Some further philosophical consequences of these results are mentioned. For instance, identifiability is a good rational reconstruction of the idea of observability. (shrink)

R. G. Collingwood saw one of the main tasks of philosophers and of historians of human thought in uncovering what he called the ultimate presuppositions of different thinkers, of different philosophical movements and of entire eras of intellectual history. He also noted that such ultimate presuppositions usually remain tacit at first, and are discovered only by subsequent reflection. Collingwood would have been delighted by the contrast that constitutes the overall theme of the essays collected in this volume. Not only has (...) this dichotomy ofviews been one ofthe mostcrucial watersheds in the entire twentieth-century philosophical thought. Not only has it remained largely implicit in the writings of the philosophers for whom it mattered most. It is a truly Collingwoodian presupposition also in that it is not apremise assumed by different thinkers in their argumentation. It is the presupposition of a question, an assumption to the effect that a certain general question can be raised and answered. Its role is not belied by the fact that several philosophers who answered it one way or the other seem to be largely unaware that the other answer also makes sense - if it does. This Collingwoodian question can be formulated in a first rough approximation by asking whether language - our actual working language, Tarski's "colloquiallanguage" - is universal in the sense of being inescapable. This formulation needs all sorts of explanations, however. (shrink)

Most current work in epistemology deals with the evaluation and justification of information already acquired. In this book, Jaakko Hintikka instead discusses the more important problem of how knowledge is acquired in the first place. His model of information-seeking is the old Socratic method of questioning, which has been generalized and brought up-to-date through the logical theory of questions and answers that he has developed. Hintikka also argues that philosophers' quest for a definition of knowledge is ill-conceived and that (...) the entire notion of knowledge should be replaced by the concept of information. He offers an analysis of the different meanings of the concept of information and of their interrelations. The result is a new and illuminating approach to the field of epistemology. (shrink)

Aristotle thought of his logic and methodology as applications of the Socratic questioning method. In particular, logic was originally a study of answers necessitated by earlier answers. For Aristotle, thought-experiments were real experiments in the sense that by realizing forms in one's mind, one can read off their properties and interrelations. Treating forms as independent entities, knowable one by one, committed Aristotle to his mode of syllogistic explanation. He did not think of existence, predication and identity as separate senses of (...) estin. Aristotle thus serves as an example of a thinker who did not rely on the distinction between the allegedly different Fregean senses, thereby shedding new light on our own conceptual presuppositions. This collection comprises several striking interpretations that Jaakko Hintikka has put forward over the years, constituting a challenge not only to Aristotelian scholars and historians of ideas, but to everyone interested in logic, epistemology or metaphysics and in their history. (shrink)

According to robust virtue epistemology, the difference between knowledge and mere true belief is that in cases of knowledge, the subject’s cognitive success is attributable to her cognitive agency. But what does it take for a subject’s cognitive success to be attributable to her cognitive agency? A promising answer is that the subject’s cognitive abilities have to contribute to the safety of her epistemic standing with respect to her inquiry, in order for her cognitive success to be attributable to her (...) cognitive agency. Call this idea the contribution thesis. The author will argue that the contribution thesis follows naturally from virtue epistemological accounts of knowledge, and that it is precisely the contribution thesis that allows the virtue epistemologist to deal with a wide variety of objections. Nevertheless, the principal aim of this paper is to argue that virtue epistemological theories of knowledge that are committed to the contribution thesis are ultimately untenable. There are cases of knowledge where the subject’s cognitive abilities do not improve the safety of the subject’s belief. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Is meaning essentially normative, and what does claiming that amount to? One popular interpretation is that in virtue of their nature meanings are capable of guiding subjects in their applications of concepts, for meaning is constituted by norms. However, the guidance view has been met with criticism to the effect that if semantic norms constitute facts about meaning, then they cannot simultaneously guide subjects in their applications. In response, some normativist authors have proposed that the key sense of ‘normative’ (...) in the claim that meaning is essentially normative is not ‘guidance’ but ‘assessment’. In this paper, I shall argue that switching from guidance to assessment offers no respite from the anti-normativist argument that normativity in the sense of prescriptivity emerges not from meaning as such but from the attitudes of subjects insofar as the normativist is unable to offer a plausible account of what makes assessment appropriate. (shrink)

I n order to appreciate properly what we are doing in this book it is necessary to realize that our approach to linguistic theorizing differs from the prevailing views. Our approach can be described by indicating what distinguishes it from the methodological ideas current in theoretical linguistics, which I consider seriously misguided. Linguists typically construe their task in these days as that of making exceptionless generalizations from particular examples. This explanatory strategy is wrong in several different ways. It presupposes that (...) we can have "intuitions" about particular examples, usually examples invented by the linguist himself or herself, reliable and sharp enough to serve as a basis of sharp generalizations. It also presupposes that we cannot have equally reliable direct access to general linguistic regularities. Both assumptions appear to me extremely dubious, and the first of them has in effect been challenged by linguists like Dwight Bol inger. There is also some evidence that the degree of unanimity among linguists is fairly low when it comes to less clear cases, even in connection with such relatively simple questions as grammaticality (acceptability). For this reason we have tried to rely more on quotations from contemporary fiction, newspapers and magazines than on linguists' and philosophers' ad hoc examples. I also find it strange that some of the same linguists as believe that we all possess innate ideas about general characteristics of humanly possible grammars assume that we can have access to them only via their particular consequences. (shrink)

Integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) into a for-profit organization’s business activities is fraught with tensions. This paper reports a case study of a construction company, exploring how different tensions emerged to challenge company-level aspirations for strategic CSR integration. The study identifies three types of persistent CSR tensions and four management practices, discussing how the management practices led the organization to navigate CSR tensions in both active and defensive ways. Furthermore, the study explicates why the case company succeeded in integrating CSR (...) into formal business strategy and shared attitudes but struggled with CSR integration in the domain of day-to-day operations. The paper contributes to the CSR literature by developing a tension-centric perspective on CSR development. It highlights the necessity of tension navigation at both the organizational and the action levels, the key role of active (as opposed to defensive) navigation of CSR tensions, and the importance of alignment between organizational and action levels in navigating tensions for sustaining strategic focus on CSR over time. (shrink)

Attachment theory proposes that the activation of the attachment system enacts emotion regulation (ER) to maintain security or cope with insecurity. However, the effects of ER on attachment states and their bidirectional influences remain poorly understood. In this ecological momentary assessment study, we examined the dynamics between attachment and ER. We hypothesised that attachment states and ER influence each other through time. Specifically, we hypothesised bidirectional short-term cycles between state attachment security and reappraisal, state attachment anxiety and rumination, and state (...) attachment avoidance and suppression. We also tested how trait attachment is related to state attachment and ER. One hundred twenty-two participants (Mage = 26.4) completed the Experiences in Close Relationship–Revised and reported state attachment and ER seven times daily for seven days. The results were only partly consistent with our cycle hypotheses yet revealed a cycle between low state attachment security and rumination that was attenuated by reappraisal. Moreover, rumination and suppression predicted increased insecure states, and reappraisal predicted increased secure and insecure states. Finally, trait attachment showed associations with state attachment and ER. Our study suggests regulatory dynamics between attachment and ER and opens important questions about their functional relationship in maintaining attachment-related behavioural patterns and emotional well-being. (shrink)

In this paper, I assess some recent critical realist constructive criticisms of Theodor Adorno, one of the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory. I argue that while there are similarities between Adorno’s treatment of causality and the critical realist notion of powers, these connections should not be taken to imply that Adorno’s conception of critique requires a critical realist powers ontology. I show that Bhaskar’s transcendental realism is at odds with the basic commitments of Adorno’s historical (...) materialism. I go on to clarify such materialism and show that to Adorno, capital is the historical compulsion characteristic of modernity. (shrink)

This book, written by one of philosophy's pre-eminent logicians, argues that many of the basic assumptions common to logic, philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics are in need of change. It is therefore a book of critical importance to logical theory. Jaakko Hintikka proposes a new basic first-order logic and uses it to explore the foundations of mathematics. This new logic enables logicians to express on the first-order level such concepts as equicardinality, infinity, and truth in the same language. The (...) famous impossibility results by Gödel and Tarski that have dominated the field for the last sixty years turn out to be much less significant than has been thought. All of ordinary mathematics can in principle be done on this first-order level, thus dispensing with the existence of sets and other higher-order entities. (shrink)

The main question of metasemantics, or foundational semantics, is why an expression token has the meaning (semantic value) that it in fact has. In his reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, Saul Kripke presented a skeptical challenge that threatened to make the foundational question unanswerable. My first contention in this paper is that the skeptical challenge indeed poses an insoluble paradox, but only for a certain kind of metasemantic theory, against which the challenge effectively works as a reductio ad absurdum (...) argument. My second contention is that as a result of rejecting the theory which entails a paradoxical outcome, we will see that the foundational question essentially involves a temporal dimension. After arguing that the skeptical challenge gives us a strong reason to adopt a historical view of meaning, I shall further argue against certain authors who claim that meanings not only have histories but futures as well, or that the meaning of a word may change retroactively in time as a consequence of counterfactual change in its future use. The major aim of the paper is thus to bring together the arguably interrelated debates about the skeptical challenge and temporal externalism in philosophy of language. (shrink)

I LOGIC IN PHILOSOPHY— PHILOSOPHY OF LOGIC i. On the relation of logic to philosophy I n this book, the consequences of certain logical insights for ...

A word of warning concerning the aims of this volume is in order. Other wise some readers might be unpleasantly surprised by the fact that two of the chapters of an ostensibly historical book are largely topical rather than historical. They are Chapters 7 and 9, respectively entitled 'Are Logical Truths Analytic?' and 'A Priori Truths and Things-In-Them selves'. Moreover, the history dealt with in Chapter 11 is so recent as to have more critical than antiquarian interest. This mixture of (...) materials may seem all the more surprising as I shall myself criticize (in Chapter I) too facile assimilations of earlier thinkers' concepts and problems to later ones. There is no inconsistency here, it seems to me. The aims of the present volume are historical, and for that very purpose, for the purpose of understanding and evaluating earlier thinkers it is vital to know the conceptual landscape in which they were moving. A crude analogy may be helpful here. No military historian can afford to neglect the topo graphy of the battles he is studying. If he does not know in some detail what kind of pass Thermopylae is or on what sort of ridge the battle of Bussaco was fought, he has no business of discussing these battles, even if this topographical information alone does not yet amount to historical knowledge. (shrink)

Mixed methods research - the combination of qualitative and quantitative data within the same design to strengthen causal inference - is gaining prominence in the social sciences but its benefits are contested. There remains confusion over which methods to mix and what is the point of mixing them. We argue that variety of evidence is what matters, not the data or methods, and that distinct epistemic principles underlie its added value for causal inference. The centrality of evidential variety also implies (...) that strong causal pluralism is untenable as a foundation for mixed methods research. (shrink)

If ontic dependence is the basis of explanation, there cannot be mathematical explanations. Accounting for the explanatory dependency between mathematical properties and empirical phenomena poses i...

Since the first chapter of this book presents an intro duction to the present state of game-theoretical semantics (GTS), there is no point in giving a briefer survey here. Instead, it may be helpful to indicate what this volume attempts to do. The first chapter gives a short intro duction to GTS and a survey of what is has accomplished. Chapter 2 puts the enterprise of GTS into new philo sophical perspective by relating its basic ideas to Kant's phi losophy (...) of mathematics, space, and time. Chapters 3-6 are samples of GTS's accomplishments in understanding different kinds of semantical phenomena, mostly in natural languages. Beyond presenting results, some of these chapters also have other aims. Chapter 3 relates GTS to an interesting line of logical and foundational studies - the so-called functional interpretations - while chapter 4 leads to certain important methodological theses. Chapter 7 marks an application of GTS in a more philo sophical direction by criticizing the Frege-Russell thesis that words like "is" are multiply ambiguous. This leads in turn to a criticism of recent logical languages (logical notation), which since Frege have been based on the ambi guity thesis, and also to certain methodological sug gestions. In chapter 8, GTS is shown to have important implications for our understanding of Aristotle's doctrine of categories, while chapter 9 continues my earlier criticism of Chomsky's generative approach to linguistic theorizing. (shrink)

Several authors have recently argued that knowledge is not the aim of inquiry since it can make sense to inquire into a question even though one knows the answer. I argue that this a faulty diagnostic for determining whether one has met the constitutive standard of success of an activity type. The constitutive standards of success tell us when an activity is successful, but such standards can be exceeded and exceeding them can be reasonable. To back this up I develop (...) an account of zetetic supererogation and argue that subjects who continue to inquire into a question while knowing the answer do what is zetetically supererogatory. (shrink)

Although there has been much recent discussion on mechanisms in philosophy of science and social theory, no shared understanding of the crucial concept itself has emerged. In this paper, a distinction between two core concepts of mechanism is made on the basis that the concepts correspond to two different research strategies: the concept of mechanism as a componential causal system is associated with the heuristic of functional decomposition and spatial localization and the concept of mechanism as an abstract form of (...) interaction is associated with the strategy of abstraction and simple models. The causal facts assumed and the theoretical consequences entailed by an explanation with a given mechanism differ according to which concept of mechanism is in use. Research strategies associated with mechanism concepts also involve characteristic biases that should be taken into account when using them, especially in new areas of application. (shrink)

The following analysis shows how developments in epistemic logic can play a nontrivial role in cognitive neuroscience. We argue that the striking correspondence between two modes of identification, as distinguished in the epistemic context, and two cognitive systems distinguished by neuroscientific investigation of the visual system (the "where" and "what" systems) is not coincidental, and that it can play a clarificatory role at the most fundamental levels of neuroscientific theory.

Most of the literature surrounding virtue reliabilism revolves around issues pertaining to the analysis of knowledge. With the exception of the lottery paradox, virtue reliabilists have paid relatively little attention to classic epistemological paradoxes, such as Moore’s paradox. This is a significant omission given how central role such paradoxes have in epistemic theorizing. In this essay I take a step towards remedying this shortcoming by providing a solution to Moore’s paradox. The solution that I offer stems directly from the core (...) of virtue reliabilism. (shrink)

Mechanisms are often characterized as causal structures and the interventionist account of causation is then used to characterize what it is to be a causal structure. The associated modularity constraint on causal structures has evoked criticism against using the theory as an account of mechanisms, since many mechanisms seem to violate modularity. This paper answers to this criticism by making a distinction between a causal system and a causal structure. It makes sense to ask what the modularity properties of a (...) given causal structure are, but not whether a causal system is modular tout court. The counter-examples to the interventionist account are systems in which a particular structure is modular in variables, but not in parameters. A failure of parameter-modularity does not by itself threaten the interventionist interpretation of the structure and the possibility of causally explaining with that structure, but it does mean that knowledge of the structure is not sufficient to constitutively explain system-level properties of the embedding system. (shrink)

Research suggests that both childhood experiences with one’s parents and individual differences in effortful control contribute to adult emotion regulation (ER). However, it is unclear how they associate with specific ER processes. In this adult study, we examined the roles of recalled parenting experiences and effortful control in daily ER selection and implementation. Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), we focused on ER strategies of reappraisal, suppression, and rumination. We hypothesized recalled parental warmth, rejection, and overcontrol to predict adult ER selection (...) and effectiveness of ER implementation and effortful control to mediate these effects. One hundred twenty-two adults answered self-reported questionnaires on their childhood experiences with their parents and effortful control. In EMA, they reported ER and emotions seven times daily for seven days. Recalled parental warmth predicted less suppression and rumination, whereas recalled overcontrol, especially in fathers, predicted greater suppression and reappraisal. However, recalled parenting experiences did not predict the effectiveness of ER implementation, and no support was found for the mediating role of effortful control between recalled parenting experiences and ER. Our findings suggest that recalled parenting experiences may guide adult ER selection rather than shape ER implementation, and these links may be largely independent of their effortful control. (shrink)

The ancient Greek method of analysis has a rational reconstruction in the form of the tableau method of logical proof. This reconstruction shows that the format of analysis was largely determined by the requirement that proofs could be formulated by reference to geometrical figures. In problematic analysis, it has to be assumed not only that the theorem to be proved is true, but also that it is known. This means using epistemic logic, where instantiations of variables are typically allowed only (...) with respect to known objects. This requirement explains the preoccupation of Greek geometers with questions as to which geometrical objects are ?given?, that is, known or ?data?, as in the title of Euclid's eponymous book. In problematic analysis, constructions had to rely on objects that are known only hypothetically. This seems strange unless one relies on a robust idea of ?unknown? objects in the same sense as the unknowns of algebra. The Greeks did not have such a concept, which made their grasp of the analytic method shaky. (shrink)