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Notes
To underline the difference between Floridi’s and Ladyman et al.’s respective views, in this paper, I keep the abbreviation (i.e. ISR) for Floridi’s version and call Ladyman et al.’s version informational OSR.
The notion of “downward path” is adopted from Stathis Psillos (2001) who marked a distinction between upward path and downward path to SR. The upward path begins from an empiricist position and negotiates its way to a structural realist stance, whereas the downward path begins from a strongly metaphysical stance and winds up with a modified and modest version of SR.
I am told that at least according to some non-eliminativist OSR-theorists (such as Ladyman et al.) what is really needed is a naturalisation of representation, say, instead of a naturalisation of information. Long (2014) has articulated the distinction clearly. While I understand the distinction, I think wrestling with the problem at the level of naturalisation of information, if possible at all, could result in a more straightforward solution to the problem of substantiating the ontological claims of ISR-theorists. This does not mean that the distinction itself is not tenable.
The logical depth is the normalised quantitative index of execution time required for generating a model of a real pattern by a near incompressible universal computer program, which is not itself computable as the output of a significantly more concise program.
Notice that Floridi’s metaphors of grey box and Russian doll (Floridi, 2008) suggest the same ontological hierarchy.
OSR’s arguments consist of the argument from under-determination and the argument from the primacy of relations. I briefly allude to the former argument. According to the argument from underdetermination, modern physics implies that there is metaphysical underdetermination between two incompatible models of the world. One model (compatible with habituated intuitions) allows for the existence of individual objects. But quantum physics is not kind to individual objects and endorses an ontology in which individual objects are not fundamental. OSR proposes that we can get rid of the dilemma by dispensing with both (individual and non-individual) packages and making ontological commitments to the structures that underlie both models (French & Ladyman, 2003). Morganti (2011) denied the premises of the argument. He argued that it is not the case that postulating objects as fundamental entities leads to a problematic form of metaphysical underdetermination.
In speaking of “the structural sciences” I follow the lead of Brunner, Taschacher, & Karsten, (2011).They classified the structural sciences (e.g. cybernetics and systems theory) as an independent field of the sciences which deal with the formal relations between the objects, irrespective of their content and nature. This structuralist aspect matters in our SR account.
Perhaps it is worth mentioning that Griffiths and Stotz (2013 chapter 6) canvassed a similar view of genetic information. They assessed the possibility of assigning meaning to genetic codes in terms of adaptation for transmission of biological specificity from one generation to the next. The efficiency of this adaptation could be analysed in terms of an information channel using the mathematical theory of communication. The genetic transmission may be regarded as a way that the organisms use to send signals to their offspring. But, as the authors argued, it could not be claimed that it grounds the semantic content of those signals. At least it could be acknowledged that genetic signals do not have all the properties of signals in the human communication systems. The genetic codes should be understood in the sense of Crick information, which consists of the causal determination of the specificity of a biomolecule and comes with a mechanistic undertone. This adds up to the conclusion that using informational language in biology does not need to be associated with a semantic preformationism. Such an association may be based on confusion between evolutionary explanations and mechanistic ones. The authors concluded that the genetic code is a form of causal information, which is a causal relationship between one physical state and another one. The relation does not need to be more intentional than Grice’s “natural meaning.” Thus, the coding problem could be solved on the basis of Shannon’s purely quantitative measure of information.
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Beni, M.D. The Downward Path to Epistemic Informational Structural Realism. Acta Anal 33, 181–197 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-017-0333-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-017-0333-4