Ivan A. Karpenko (2025), Epistemology & Philosophy of Science (Эпистемология и философия науки) 62(2), 190–207 — DOI-10.5840/eps202562230
Key takeaways
- Informational structural realism, extended with the claim that empirically equivalent but structurally different descriptions (dualities with different spacetime metrics or dimensions) have equal ontological standing, makes information (the descriptions themselves) fundamental and so vindicates theoretical objects against non-eliminative OSR.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-096. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Karpenko surveys versions of structural realism and proposes an expanded informational structural realism (ISR). He criticises a non-eliminative OSR that takes entities and structures as primitives but denies theoretical objects. He draws on scientific realism, the information interpretation of quantum mechanics, digital ontology and string-theory dualities. He argues that theories built on different spacetime metrics can yield the same description and the same predictions while implying different fundamental pictures. On his view, what is fundamental is the family of equivalent descriptions (information) rather than substantival spacetime, and theoretical objects therefore exist as ontological primitives.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 0 seconds of active reading over 0 sessions. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-096 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Rejected — not worth a reader’s time on this topic. It misreports its source (Floridi, LIT-152) on the points it builds on, and it states contested or wrong physics as established. Its one novel move, reading dualities as equal-status alternatives rather than underdetermination, is asserted, not argued, and is done properly in the duality literature (LIT-113, LIT-199).
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-096, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — never opened by the owner (t=0). The argument is derivative of Floridi, the text is in Russian, and the skim captures the main line.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-096 is that reading):
- A recent extension of Floridi (LIT-152) that links ISR to the duality literature (LIT-199, LIT-113, LIT-115).
- Check whether “equivalent descriptions are the fundamental reality” is argued for or assumed. The “it is proven” claim in the abstract looks stronger than the argument.
- Compare with Le Bihan & Read (LIT-113) on interpretive versus motivational approaches to duality.
Access when seeded: Full-text PDF (18 pp., open access via PDC, found through Unpaywall) read by text extraction. The article is in Russian with an English title, abstract and keywords, so the skim relies on my reading of the Russian; I read the abstracts, the opening pages and the conclusion in full, and the rest only through passages found by term search (Floridi, Chakravartty, duality, holography, Wheeler, digital). Page numbers are the journal’s, which is PDF page + 189. citation_publication_date 2025/05/29 is from the PDC landing page. The PDF’s own DOI line is garbled (“DOI: 17”), so I took the DOI from Crossref. Crossref lists the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, as a second “author”; that is the publisher/affiliation, not a co-author, and the article’s byline gives HSE University.