Abstract
The paper surveys Floridi’s attempt for laying down informational structural realism (ISR). After considering a number of reactions to the pars destruens of Floridi’s attack on the digital ontology, I show that Floridi’s enterprise for enriching the ISR by borrowing elements from the ontic form of structural realism (in the pars construens) is blighted by a haunting inconsistency. ISR has been originally developed by Floridi as a restricted and level dependent form of structural realism which remains mainly bonded within the borders of a Kantian perspective. I argue that this perspective doesn’t mesh nicely with the ontic interpretation that Floridi attached to the ISR. I substantiate this claim through the assessment of Floridi’s strategy for reconciling the epistemic and ontic forms of the SR, as well as by close examination of his use of method of levels of abstraction and his notion of semantic information. My proposal is that the ISR could be defended best against the mentioned and similar objections by being interpreted as an extension of the epistemic SR.
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Notes
In other words, one of two following formulations would always be the case:
(Gunk) ∀ x∃yPPyx
or
(Atom) ∀ x∃y(Ay ∧ Pyx).
It happens, say, when space–time is continuous but the mereology of material objects is discrete:
(GunkSpace) ∀ x(σx → ∃yPPyx)
(AtoMatter) ∀ x(μx → ∃y(Ay ∧ Pyx)).
Berto and Tagliabue’s (2014) second objection has been built upon the observation that it is possible to translate the problem of digital versus analogue dichotomy to a question about the number of things. I don’t think this is essentially different from the first objection. According to the critics, digital versus analogue can be a category mistake, only if it makes no sense to speak of the total number of things (p.493). There may be countably or uncountably, finitely or infinitely many things in the world, and the worldly stuff may be capable of finding a linear order or not. But, the question of the number of the things doesn’t seem to be nonsensical ipso facto, even though the critics accept that it is possible to say that there are innumerable things after setting the transfinite arithmetic aside (p. 494).
The advocates of the Ontic SR (OSR) claim that all that is out in the world is the structure (Ladyman 1998; French 2014). This outright metaphysical claim is prone to different interpretations. According to one reading of the OSR, the relata of given relations always turn out to be relational structures themselves on further analysis (Ross et al. 2007, p. 155). This seems gunky (continuous) according to the critics. But it is also possible to imagine atomist-friendly versions of OSR. Interestingly, the critics claim that the non-eliminativist version of OSR, which has been also advocated by Floridi (2008), seems to be capable of giving rise to such a construal (Berto and Tagliabue 2014, p. 492).
This point has been brought to my attention by the Reviewer #2.
It holds that
Premise 1: Entity a, posited in historical period p1, was subsequently agreed not to exist.
Premise 2: Entity b, posited in historical period p2, was subsequently agreed not to exist.
Premise 3: Entity c, posited in historical period p3, was subsequently agreed not to exist.
Premise n: Entity i, posited in historical period pn, was subsequently agreed not to exist.
(Inductive) Conclusion: The entities posited today will subsequently be shown not to exist. (French 2014, p. 2).
To say of some object that it is “permutation invariant” means that it is invariant under the action of Perm(X), which is a group of bijective maps of a set X onto itself. A permutation invariant object remains invariant remains unchanged under the operation of the permutation operators of Perm(X) that (for n ≥ 2) exchange the components of the objects. To give a rough comparison, we may say that the coin is not permutation invariant, because there is an observable difference between heads-up and tails-up states of the coin, whereas the quantum particles are permutation invariant, that is there is no distinction between spin-up and spin-down states of a. The result is that we could consider them as indistinguishable (French 2014, pp. 34–35).
See John Bell’s explanation of the failure of Einstein’s proposal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8CCfOD1iu8.
Reviewer #4 brought this point to my attention.
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I benefited from the comments of the two anonymous referees of this journal to improve the arguments of this paper, the debt is gratefully acknowledged.
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Beni, M.D. Epistemic Informational Structural Realism. Minds & Machines 26, 323–339 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-016-9403-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-016-9403-4