The logician and philosopher Jaakko Hintikka was born in Vantaa, Finland. Receiving his doctorate from the University of Helsinki in 1956, he was a junior fellow at Harvard University from 1956 to 1959, a research professor at the Academy of Finland, and a professor of philosophy at the universities of Helsinki, Stanford, Florida State, and currently Boston University.

Hintikka developed semantical logical methods and uses them in philosophy. He advocates applying mathematical logic, especially model theory, in philosophy, most notably to questions in philosophy of language, but also to the study of Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. His main contributions in logic are those of model set, distributive normal form, possible-worlds semantics, and game-theoretic semantics.

A critical view of the Tarski truth definition led Hintikka to the concept of a model set as a more constructive approach to semantics. A model set has enough information to...