The Method of Levels of Abstraction

By Luciano Floridi. Minds and Machines, 2008

329 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/79453d53700a6bca7160ecee9560d758f794500b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Christian List
2. Mariarosaria Taddeo
3. Luciano Floridi

In History and Philosophy of Science

1. Christian List
2. Mariarosaria Taddeo
3. Luciano Floridi

In Philosophy

1. Christian List
2. Mariarosaria Taddeo
3. Luciano Floridi

Citations in the corpus

• What the Near Future of Artificial Intelligence Could Be (2019, background): “Part of the difficulty is to get the level of abstraction right (Floridi 2008a, 2008b), i.e. to identify the set of relevant observables (Bthe seeds of time^) on which to focus because those are the ones that will make the real, significant difference.”
• Levels: descriptive, explanatory, and ontological (2019, background): “…a levelled ontology was central to the British Emergentism of the 19th and early 20th centuries.5 1See, e.g., Oppenheim and Putnam (1958), Fodor (1974), Owens (1989), Beckermann, Flohr, andKim (1992), Kim (1998, 2002), Scha↵er (2003), Floridi (2008), and Ellis, Noble, and O’Connor (2012).”
• The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate (2016, unknown): “Discussion of a concept as complex as ‘algorithm’ inevitably encounters problems of abstraction or ‘talking past each other’ due to a failure to specify a level of abstraction (LoA) for discussion, and thus limit the relevant set of observables (Floridi, 2008).”
• Recommender systems and their ethical challenges (2020, unknown): “Specifying these parameter choices is highly dependent on the domain of application and the level of abstraction [LoAs, see (Floridi 2016)]1 from which the problem is considered (Jannach et al.”
• The explanation game: a formal framework for interpretable machine learning (2020, unknown): “Inspired by the Formal Methods literature in computer science (Boca et al. 2010), the levelist approach has been extended to conceptualise a wide array of problems in the philosophy of information (Floridi 2008a, 2011, 2017).”
• The ethics of AI in health care: A mapping review. (2020, background): “…more thoroughly to identify how the ethical issues may vary depending on whether the analysis was being conducted at: (i) individual, (ii) interpersonal, (iii) group (e.g. family or population), (iv) institutional, (v) sectoral, and/or (v) societal levels of abstraction (LoAs) (Floridi, 2008).”
• The Debate on the Moral Responsibilities of Online Service Providers (2015, unknown): “Rather, a LoA is a tool that helps to make explicit the observation perspective and constrain it to only those elements that are relevant in a particular observation for the chosen purpose (Floridi 2008).”