The distinction between food and poison belongs, I would say, to the a priori concepts of biology - not of logic.
HP: What is food for a cell is decided by the evolutionary history of the cell as recorded by its heritable information.
There are no a priori foods as illustrated by the many extremotrophs. My favorite extremotroph is the fungus that eats compact disks. I would not say calling a CD food is an a priori biological concept.
FS: As indicated, this is not the Kantian conception of a priori. For those interested in the competing notion of a priori, see ch. 8 of my Diagrammatology (2007). Or Barry Smith's "In Defense of Extreme (Fallibilistic) Apriorism" ( http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/In-Defense.pdf )
HP: The Smith paper was confusing. Smith concludes: "Certain pre-empirical synthetic intrinsically plausible propositions thus require ontological correlates which are their truth-makers. Hence, there are intelligible structures in the world, which we could also call 'a priori structures'."
How are these structures distinguished from the concept of natural laws?
Howard
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