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The world is either digital or analogue

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Abstract

We address an argument by Floridi (Synthese 168(1):151–178, 2009; 2011a), to the effect that digital and analogue are not features of reality, only of modes of presentation of reality. One can therefore have an informational ontology, like Floridi’s Informational Structural Realism, without commitment to a supposedly digital or analogue world. After introducing the topic in Sect. 1, in Sect. 2 we explain what the proposition expressed by the title of our paper means. In Sect. 3, we describe Floridi’s argument. In the following three sections, we raise three difficulties for it, (i) an objection from intuitions: Floridi’s view is not supported by the intuitions embedded in the scientific views he exploits (Sect. 4); (ii) an objection from mereology: the view is incompatible with the world’s having parts (Sect. 5); (iii) an objection from counting: the view entails that the question of how many things there are doesn’t make sense (Sect. 6). In Sect. 7, we outline two possible ways out for Floridi’s position. Such ways out involve tampering with the logical properties of identity, and this may be bothersome enough. Thus, Floridi’s modus ponens will be our (and most ontologists’) modus tollens.

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Notes

  1. Our approach to DO is described in Berto et al. (2010).

  2. (Lewis (1986), p. 1).

  3. Some postmodern metaphysician, some philosopher of science of Kuhnian sympathies, or some advocate of the disunity of science such as Dupré (1993), may take such extremely different theories as Aristotle’s tà physikà, Newtonian mechanics, general relativity or quantum mechanics, as speaking of different worlds altogether and, perhaps because of this, as incommensurable. We set this issue aside, for it appears to be irrelevant to assess Floridi’s point. His structural realism is not a postmodern ontology: it is committed to the existence of a mind-independent reality populated by objects, as we are about to see. Several structuralists in the philosophy of science, in fact, invoke structuralism precisely as a vindication of realism in the face of radical theory change (see Worrall 1989; Saunders 2003; Ladyman 1998).

  4. Well, sometimes it looks like it does: “we go on to deny that, strictly speaking, there are ‘things”’ (Ladyman and Ross 2007, p. 121); “there are no entities in the material mode according to us” (p. 186). But if one took take these claims at face value, one would have to consider their book plainly inconsistent, as we are about to see.

  5. Thanks to our anonymous referee #2 for pressing us on the importance of taking Floridi’s Kantian view seriously. This view, as based on a constructivist epistemology, is explained in a detailed way in Floridi (2011b), in the context of a general methodology for philosophical enquiry.

  6. Thanks to our anonymous referee #1 for pressing us to clarify this point.

  7. See Berto and Tagliabue (2012) for a philosophically oriented introduction to Life, probably the most popular cellular automaton; the locus classicus is Berlekamp et al. (1982).

  8. Sider uses the term in the context of an extension of David Lewis’ theory of natural properties: substantive ontological questions are those about structural features of reality, questions “to be cast in perfectly joint-carving terms” (Sider 2012, p. 46).

  9. Or almost so: see e.g. Cotnoir and Bacon (2012) for a perspective rejecting antisymmetry, yielding a non-wellfounded mereology. We leave this option aside, for it doesn’t threaten our argument.

  10. See for example Lewis (1986), Sider (2001), Casati and Varzi (1999) for the yes-side, and Inwagen (1990), Simons (1987), Koslicki (2008) for the no-side.

  11. “Why suppose that there is any such thing [as a unique parthood relation]? It is supposed to be the relation that obtains between parts of any whole, but the wholes mentioned above are hugely disparate and the composition relations studied by the special sciences are sui generis. We have no reason to believe that an abstract composition relation is anything other than an entrenched philosophical fetish” (Ladyman and Ross 2007, p. 21).

  12. And many other typical mereological issues make perfect sense in a structural world. Take again the problem of unrestricted mereological composition: given any two objects \(x \)and \(y\), is their mereological fusion automatically given? Some say yes, other say no, as we have seen. Now given any two real patterns \(x \)and \(y\), is there a real pattern automatically obtained by conjoining them? (Some) structural ontologists deny this, on the basis of their conditions for pattern existence: “The object named by ‘my left nostril and the capital of Namibia and Miles Davis’ last trumpet solo’ is not a real pattern, because identification of it supports no generalizations not supported by identification of the three conjuncts considered separately” (Ibid, p. 231).

  13. Floridi leaves aside the issue whether such a totality may have a larger cardinality for this is irrelevant: if it reaches the continuum, that’s enough as far as his point is concerned.

  14. Thanks to our anonymous referee #1 for suggesting that we make this point explicit.

  15. We mention this only en passant, for Floridi (2003) speaks against letting quantum-theoretic considerations, e.g., from the phenomenon of entanglement, teach us lessons in general ontology; so he may be resilient to remarks of this kind anyway.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Northern Institute of Philosophy, King’s College, University of Aberdeen, High Street, Aberdeen,  AB24 3UB, Scotland, UK

    Francesco Berto

  2. iLabs Milan, via Pattari, 6, 20122 , Milan, Italy

    Jacopo Tagliabue

  3. Philosophy Faculty, University of Milan-San Raffaele, via Olgettina, 58, 20132,  Milan, Italy

    Jacopo Tagliabue

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  1. Francesco Berto
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  2. Jacopo Tagliabue
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Correspondence to Francesco Berto.

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Between 2012 and 2013 parts of this paper were presented at the Philosophy Club at the University of St. Andrews, at the Fifth Philosophy of Information Workshop at the University of Hertfordshire, and at the Ontology Workshop at the University of Milan-San Raffaele. We are grateful to the many persons who provided helpful comments and feedback in those occasions, and to two anonymous referees of this journal.

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Berto, F., Tagliabue, J. The world is either digital or analogue. Synthese 191, 481–497 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0285-1

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