Abstract
Luciano Floridi’s informational structural realism (ISR) takes a constructionist attitude towards the problems of epistemology and metaphysics, but the question of the nature of the semantical component of his view remains vexing. In this paper, I propose to dispense with the semantical component of ISR completely. I outline a Syntactical version of ISR (SISR for short). The unified entropy-based framework of information has been adopted as the groundwork of SISR. To establish its realist component, SISR should be able to dissolve the latching problem. We have to be able to account for the informational structures–reality relationship in the absence of the standard semantical resources. The paper offers a pragmatic solution to the latching problem. I also take pains to account for the naturalistic plausibility of this solution by grounding it in the recent computational neuroscience of the predictive coding and the free energy principle.
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Notes
Verification and validation could be defined on the basis of checking whether we are constructing (or have constructed) what we have (or had) planned to construct checking whether we are constructing what is required.
The constructionist approach to truth and knowledge resurfaced more recently in (Floridi 2016), where he asserted that on some occasions, a proposition, a message, or some information qualifies as being knowledge (and truthful) not just in itself but relationally, with respect to an informational agent. He also demonstrated that there are cases in which the poietic (constructive) intervention on a system determines the truth of the model of that system.
This is different from the first sense of ‘syntactical’. For example, the theory of semantic information of Bar-Hillel and Carnap is semantic in the second sense, but syntactic in the first sense (it is based on state-descriptions). This point has brought to my attention by one of the referees of this journal.
Gibbs entropy is derived out of (\( F = - T\ln Z \)) where F is free energy, T is equal to fixed temperature, and Z is partition function equal to \( \sum\nolimits_{i} e^{{- \epsilon_{i}/T}}. \)
Although I do not endorse a fully human constructionist stance, I do not think that the proposal that I develop here is at odds with Floridi’s (2017) remarks on the significance of the constructionist mechanisms of the formation of knowledge. This is because I do not assert that construction would be reducible to a natural process without information loss. The main difference is that while Floridi draws on computer science to articulate his conception of semantics, I inform my solution by drawing on the resources of empirical psychology and computational neuroscience. Also, notice that that Floridi simply offered a plea for non-naturalism. Therefore, I do not need to engage a debate over the correctness of the naturalist stance, even if my conception of naturalism were at odds with Floridi’s constructionism. But the mentioned stances are not at odds.
This could be worded as the ‘mind-world relationship’ too. But as this paper is concerned with the philosophy of science, I articulate the problem in a way that underscores what is important from the perspective of the philosophy of science.
Enactivism and embodied mind thesis define cognition as embodied action and underline the role agents as dynamical systems enacting in the world. Enactivism could be traced back to the continental traditions that underscores the role of body in the cognition (see Varela et al. 1991). Extended mind thesis is stemmed out of Clark and Chalmers’ active externalism and their emphasis on the contribution of the brain and environment in forging a coupled cognitive system (Clark and Chalmers 1998).
This indicates that the data should not be either preinstalled in the cognitive system or uploaded from an external source.
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Beni, M.D. Syntactical Informational Structural Realism. Minds & Machines 28, 623–643 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-018-9463-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-018-9463-8