If one wants to be serious about the philosophy of information during this decade or the last, there are certain theorists and philosophers who are standard-setters and with whom one must engage. Luciano Floridi is the leading philosopher of information in the world in terms of influence and publication record across most topics of interest in the philosophy of information.
In the spirit of philosophical discourse and argumentation, I make an attempt at critiquing Floridi's move from Wheeler style 'It from Bit' digital ontology, which he rejects as wrong, to an informational ontology according to which information - defined in Kantian Transcendentalist terms - sits at the bottom of the ontology as the existential basis of the furniture of the world. I argue that the Informational Structural Realism that is formulated by Floridi is set up metaphysically such that it is still very much classifiable as a digital ontology/metaphysics, if not exactly the same kind as the Wheeler style lexically and instrumentally based proposal that he intends to reject and supplant. In other words, instead of replacing Wheeler's It-From-Bit Digital ontology with informational ontology that is not binary digital, Floridi replaces it instead with a different (lower level and non-lexical) kind of binary discretising, and thus digital, ontology.
Forthcoming in Erkenntnis:
ISR is Still a Digital Ontology
May 11, 2018
Abstract. I will
analyse Floridi’s rejection of digital ontologies and his positive proposal for
an Informational Structural Realism (ISR). I intend to show that ISR is still
fundamentally a digital ontology, albeit with some different metaphysical
commitments to those that Floridi rejects. I will argue that even though
Floridi deploys the method of levels of abstraction adapted from computer science,
and has established a Kantian transcendentalist conception of both information
and structure, ISR still reduces to a discretised binary, and therefore digital,
ontology. The digital ontologies that Floridi rejects are John Wheeler’s “It
from Bit” conception and computational (including pancomputational) metaphysics
(although there are others). They’re rejected predominantly on the basis that
they rely upon a false dichotomy between digital discrete and continuous
metaphysics (with which I agree). ISR involves a Kantian transcendentalist
conception of de re relations that is
intended to avoid this false dichotomy. However, I’ll argue that the binary,
discrete, digital component of digital ontology is retained in ISR, and
therefore ISR is still a digital ontology since its conception of information
reduces to binary discrete de re
relations. As such, ISR comes down on one side of the rejected ontic dichotomy
of digital metaphysics, and so an informational metaphysics that is not a
digital ontology is still a promissory note in the philosophy of information.
Keywords: ISR, digital
ontology, Floridi, non-eliminative ontic structural realism, epistemic
structural realism, philosophy of information
