According to Luciano Floridi (2008), informational structural realism provides a framework to reconcile the two main versions of realism about structure: the epistemic formulation (according to which all we can know is structure) and the ontic version (according to which structure is all there is). The reconciliation is achieved by introducing suitable levels of abstraction and by articulating ...

The concept of heterotopia was introduced and immediately abandoned by Michel Foucault in 1966 ^ 67, but it quickly diffused across human geography, urban theory, and cultural studies during the 1990s. Notwithstanding the deserved impact of Foucault's overall work on these fields, there are some conceptual problems with the heterotopia concept. While the desire for a single term to probe spatia...

The debate on structuralism in the philosophy of mathematics has brought into focus a question about the status of meta-mathematics. It has been raised by Stewart Shapiro in (Shapiro, 2005), where he compares the ongoing discussion on structuralism in category theory to the Frege-Hilbert controversy on axiomatic systems. Shapiro outlines an answer according to which meta-mathematics is understo...

Algebra, Mathematical Structuralism and

I use an old challenge to motivate a new view. The old challenge is due to variation in our perceptions of secondary qualities. The challenge is to say whose perceptions are accurate. The new view is about how we manage to perceive secondary qualities, and thus manage to perceive them accurately or inaccurately. I call it perceptual structuralism. I first introduce the challenge and point out d...

Structuralism is a view about the subject matter of mathematics according to which what matters are structural relationships in abstraction from the intrinsic nature of the related objects. Mathematics is seen as the free exploration of structural possibilities, primarily through creative concept formation, postulation, and deduction. The items making up any particular system exemplifying the s...

Under what conditions does a physical system implement or realize a computation? Structuralism about computational implementation, espoused by Chalmers and others, holds that a physical system realizes a computation just in the case the system instantiates a pattern of causal organization isomorphic to the computation‟s formal structure. I argue against structuralism through counter-examples dr...

In this essay, I consider the ontological status of spacetime from the points of view of the standard tensor formalism and three alternatives: twistor theory, Einstein algebras, and geometric algebra. I briefly review how classical field theories can be formulated in each of these formalisms, and indicate how this suggests a structural realist interpretation of spacetime.