On Knowing, Knowing that one Knows and Consciousness

Abstract

It is an honour to receive a formal invitation to honour Jaako Hintikka, a logician, philosopher and scholar of preternatural energy and erudition. I cannot however match a private or unofficial tribute which I paid to him in 1967–1968, when the sense that a new ideal of order and system had overtaken the work I was doing caused me to abandon a manuscript I had been working on for some years about self-deception and the opacity of consciousness. The ideal in question was that represented by Hintikka’s Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1962) — a book with which I disagreed, but which I found I could not meet on its own terms.