Dear Howard, lists - At 04:16 AM 4/21/2015, Frederik Stjernfelt wrote:
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<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremotroph>. My favorite extremotroph is the fungus that eats compact <http://www.nature.com/news/2001/010627/full/news010628-11.html> disks. I would not say calling a CD food is an a priori biological concept. Haha! But that is not the argument. The argument that the categories food and poison are a priori, not which substances are nourishing or poisonous for the single type of organism. 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<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? I would not say the exact laws which involve empirical matter, like the size of constants. Best F
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