THE CONCEPT OF INFORMATION IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ONTOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC REALISM

It is a complicated task for the philosophy of information to justify the introduction into the ontology of modern scientific realism such entities as information, information- al data, and so on. On one hand, scientific realism is a basic viewpoint of contemporary natural sciences. It asserts as real only physical phenomena - material bodies and phys- ical processes in the natural world. On the other, information more often is interpreted as some ideal superstructure above the material world. Material objects or processes can bear information but they are not information as such. Rather, information refers to semantic component that is inherent in matter or transmitted with the help of material objects.Information is ideal. It corresponds to the ontological views of the classical rational philosophical tradition in Greece (Plato, Aristotle) but not to modern scientific realism. From Plato’s point of view, reality is divided to two parts: the physical and the meta- physical. The metaphysical world is the world of ideal entities, situated above the world of physical things. In this case, information would be interpreted as the content of this metaphysical world. Interpretation of this kind can in fact be found in classical philo- sophical texts: for example, Cicero used the term “informare” to denote knowledge of the world in forms (ideas). This fact strictly refers to Greek rational tradition of Platoand Aristotle.However, the ontology of modern scientific realism fully rejects Platonism as a philosophical relic of the past into which speculative metaphysical entities were unrea- sonably entered without some observations and experimental verification. It would be seem that we have a strong methodological alternative that is deadlocked in both direc- tions. We should either deny the existence of information as a specific ontological seg- ment of reality (not possible with the very intensive use of this concept in contemporary science and culture) or transform the ontology of scientific realism, having given itmetaphysical characteristics (not acceptable, of course, to the contemporary scientific community).The main task of this article is to present an interpretation of the concept of infor- mation which on one hand lets to distinguish information from physical reality and give it specific ontological status, but, on the other allows us to return the basic theses of scientific realism. In this way, we hope to find a relevant mode to enter the concept of information into a modern ontology of scientific realism.

Keywords

Authors

References