Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0

In this course

Jonathan Schaffer is a metaphysician whose work on ontological hierarchy and mereology (part-whole relations) figures in debates about whether reality actually stratifies into discrete levels or whether such "levelism" is merely an analytical convenience. The course readings invoke him to challenge the computational paradigm's tendency to model systems as clean hierarchies, arguing that while epistemological levelism (analyzing things by level) may be useful, ontological levelism (claiming levels exist as fundamental features of reality) is philosophically untenable. His critique matters for understanding how AI and systems theory inherit unexamined assumptions about modularity and composition from mid-century science.

Mentioned in 1 reading

Luciano Floridi

The Method of Levels of Abstraction

3

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…Russell, B. (1902). Letter to Frege. In J. van Heijenoort (Ed.), From frege to gödel: A source book in mathematical logic, 1879–1931 (pp. 124–125). Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1967. Salthe, S. N. (1985). Evolving hierarchical s…

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