How Luciano Floridi might approach Political Science

The discipline we have come to call 'political science' offers a fertile, albeit often muddled, ground for philosophical inquiry. When we consider the organization of human societies, the allocation of resources, and the very structures of power, we are, fundamentally, grappling with the management of information and the creation of ordered systems within the infosphere. The problem, as I see it, is not with the aims of political inquiry, but with a persistent lack of conceptual clarity regarding its core constituents.

For too long, our understanding of political phenomena has been confined to the physical realm – territory, institutions, and human actors understood primarily as biological entities. Yet, as the digital recedes into the very fabric of our existence, becoming not merely a tool but our environment, so too must our understanding of politics adapt. We are no longer solely dealing with interactions within a shared physical space, but within a vast, interconnected informational milieu.

Consider the concept of 'governance'. Is it merely the decree of a sovereign, or is it also the emergent order arising from algorithms that shape our access to knowledge and influence our choices? We must ask: what constitutes 'political agency' when systems of influence are increasingly opaque and distributed? Are we to treat artificial agents, capable of processing and acting upon vast swathes of information, as mere instruments, or do they, by their very informational complexity and impact, demand a re-evaluation of our ethical and political frameworks? The challenge, then, is not to invent new political theories for a digital age, but to re-ontologize our existing ones, grounding them in a robust understanding of information as a fundamental constituent of reality. The…

Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Luciano Floridi’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.