Post-Structural Informational Realism

In my dissertation, I establish a generative tension between Luciano Floridi’s structuralist approach to Philosophy of Information and Jacques Derrida’s post-structuralist theorizing. Central to this tension are themes of totalization; structuralist information theory establishes reality as the totality of information, while post-structuralism warns of a violence inherent to such totalitarianism. I use this tension as an entry point into information ontology. In my poster, I first construct information ontology according to Floridi, establishing his theory of Informational Structural Realism (ISR). I then deconstruct this ontology, drawing forward two core problems which haunt ISR. I label the first problem the ontic-ontological problem, as it involves a conceptual and methodological confusion between ontic existents and ontological existence. I label the second problem the abstract-concrete problem, as it involves the failure to account for the movement from noumenal data to phenomenal data. Finally, I reconstruct a theory of Post-Structural Informational Realism (PSIR), arguing that it overcomes the problems implicit in ISR. I additionally explain how reconceptualizing information ontology to subvert informational totality has practical and theoretical implications for information epistemology and information ethics, as it orients informational-being-in-the-world towards the yet-to-come and towards those-to-come. This construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction challenges foundational assumptions in philosophy of information.