Beni offers an alternative to Floridi's informational structural realism (ISR), and the informational ontic structural realism of James Ladyman and Don Ross.
He suggests a different approach to ISR and informational NOSR (non-eliminative ontic structural realism) which is more ontologically modest. He refers to it as epistemic informational structural realism. He takes a top-down approach starting with the scientific realist conception of structure common in NOSR, but rejects that the naturalisation of information has succeeded as a project, and so elects to deploy an epistemic interpretation that accomodates Floridi's transcendental realism about information and informational structure.
I don't agree with the findings because I am not Kantian enough, and I think that physicalism and reductionism about information in the naturalisation of information are undersold. I think that there are essentially two ways to go regarding the naturalisation of information. One is to bite the bullet on physical reduction of transmission of patterns - like I take it that Ladyman, Ross, and Collier have done (at different points) - and the other is to embrace pluralism about the nature of information in the context of levels of abstraction in a transcendentalist framework like Floridi has done. I favour the former approach because 1. I think that Floridi's realist transcendentalist conception of data and information - which bottoms out at differences de re - is thus inherently redcutionist anyway, 2. I am not so pessimistic about the project of the naturalisation of information and 3. in keeping with (2) I think that only physical causation can sustain real information transmission, and that real information transmission is a necessary condition for the acquisition of actual scientific data, and so physical causation is a necessary condition for the acquisition of scientific data and the representation thereof in models and theories.
Here is an alternative link to Beni's paper:
The Downward Path to Epistemic Informational Structural Realism
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12136-017-0333-4
Beni, Majid Davoody. 2017. “The Downward Path to
Epistemic Informational Structural Realism.” Acta Analytica, October.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-017-0333-4.
Floridi, Luciano. 2008. “A Defence of Informational
Structural Realism.” Synthese 161 (2):219–53.
Ladyman, James, Don Ross, David Spurrett, and John
Collier. 2007. “Rainforest Realism and the Unity of Science.” In Every Thing
Must Go. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199276196.003.0004.
You can link to Beni's ResearchGate Profile here:
You can link to Beni's ResearchGate Profile here: