Reality can be studied at different levels, so forms of “levelism” have often been advocated in the past.[^1] In the 1970s, levelism nicely dovetailed with the computational turn and became a standard approach both in science and in philoso…In this paper, I agree with Heil and Schaffer that ontological levelism is probably untenable. However, I shall also argue that epistemological levelism should be retained as a fundamental and indispensable method of conceptual analysis, if…Floridi, L. (2004b). The informational approach to structural realism. final draft available as IEG—Research Report 22.11.04, http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/floridi/pdf/latmoa.pdf.
Floridi, L. (2004c). On the logical unsolvability of the gett…
John Heil
philosopher · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Heil appears as a philosophical interlocutor on the question of ontological levels and their viability, specifically invoked alongside Schaffer in debates about whether reality actually divides into discrete strata or whether such divisions are merely epistemic conveniences. The course reading uses Heil's skepticism toward ontological levelism to frame a distinction: while rejecting the claim that reality *is* fundamentally stratified, the author retains epistemological levelism as a methodological tool for analysis. His work thus anchors discussions about how computational and systems-theoretic models (which inherently operate across multiple levels) relate to claims about what ontologically exists.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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Jonathan Schaffer 2Immanuel Kant 1Allen Newell 1Daniel Dennett 1David Marr 1Herbert Simon 1Hilary Putnam 1John Foster 1Mihajlo Mesarovic 1Ned Block 1Paul Oppenheim 1William Wimsatt 1Brian Flinn 1Charles Antony Richard Hoare 1Colin L. Foster 1Friedrich Nietzsche 1Ian Hayes 1Jeff W. Sanders 1Jeroen van den Hoven 1Jifeng He 1John Weckert 1Luciano Floridi 1Massimo Negrotti 1Murray Gell-Mann 1Rex Welshon 1Steven D. Hales 1