Luciano Floridi (2007), Synthese 161(2), 219–253 (online 2007; March 2008 issue) — DOI-10.1007/s11229-007-9163-z
Key takeaways
- Epistemic and ontic structural realism can be reconciled through the method of levels of abstraction, and the structural objects that ontic structural realism needs can be read as informational objects, clusters of mind-independent differences, which gives “informational structural realism”.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-099. What follows is what the work says about itself.
This is the revised text of a 2003 keynote at the first Australian Computing and Philosophy Conference. The first part defends an informational version of structural realism in three steps. First, epistemic and ontic structural realism are compatible. Second, not every relatum is logically prior to every relation. Third, structural objects can be spelled out as informational objects, which applies to observables and unobservables alike. The upshot is a world made up of interacting informational objects. The second part answers ten objections raised by colleagues.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 55 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-099 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the source statement of informational structural realism, which the literature cites and builds on (Karpenko LIT-215, Bynum, Beni, Long, Wheeler). Read §§2.4, 3 and 5 for the position and §6.9 for what “informational” does and does not mean. The LoA reconciliation is a proposal, not a result.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-099, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — a load-bearing, much-cited position in the structural-realism cluster (t=55s). The skim captures the three-step argument; the ten replies are what remains unread.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-099 is that reading):
- This is the source position that LIT-215 (Karpenko) extends. A deeper reading should compare what Karpenko adds, such as digital ontology and quantum-information interpretations.
- Check whether the difference-as-Ur-relation argument really escapes the regress, or only moves it into the LoA machinery.
- The “information” at issue is Floridi’s philosophy-of-information notion, not Shannon’s measure. The information-theory tag is justified only in that broad sense, so a deeper reading should confirm it.
Access when seeded: Springer pages are blocked by a bot challenge; Crossref gives online date 2007-03-15. Full text read from the author’s accepted preprint (51 pp.) in the University of Hertfordshire repository (uhra.herts.ac.uk/id/eprint/2249), found via Unpaywall; page numbers below are the preprint’s. Volume, issue and pages are from Crossref.