Abstract‘Yellow Rain’, an alleged biological warfare agent thought to be utilized in parts of both South East Asia and Afghanistan, may be composed in part of the mycotoxins, trichothecenes. However, more recent analyses suggest that the ‘Rain’ was mainly honey bee excreta. The history of the controversy together with the biological effects, chemistry as well as the fungi producing these mycotoxins and agricultural commodities affected by trichothecenes are reviewed.

With his customary incisiveness, W. V. Quine presents logic as the product of two factors, truth and grammar--but argues against the doctrine that the logical truths are true because of grammar or language. Rather, in presenting a general theory of grammar and discussing the boundaries and possible extensions of logic, Quine argues that logic is not a mere matter of words.

Naturalism holds that there is no higher access to truth than empirically testable hypotheses. Still it does not repudiate untestable hypotheses. They fill out interstices of theory and lead to further hypotheses that are testable.A hypothesis is tested by deducing, from it and a background of accepted theory, some observation categorical that does not follow from the background alone. This categorical, a generalized conditional compounded of two observation sentences, admits in turn of a primitive experimental test.The observation sentences themselves, like (...) ape cries and bird calls, are in holophrastic association with ranges of neural intake. Denotation of determinate objects figures neither in this association nor in deducing the categorical from the scientific hypotheses. Hence the indeterminacy of reference; ontology is purely auxiliary to the structure of theory. Truth, however, is seen still as transcendent at least in this sense: we say of a superseded scientific theory not that it ceased to be true, but that it is found to have been false. (shrink)

Things and Their Place in Theories Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and ...

This book is a translation of W.V. Quine's Kant Lectures, given as a series at Stanford University in 1980. It provide a short and useful summary of Quine's philosophy. There are four lectures altogether: I. Prolegomena: Mind and its Place in Nature; II. Endolegomena: From Ostension to Quantification; III. Endolegomena loipa: The forked animal; and IV. Epilegomena: What's It all About? The Kant Lectures have been published to date only in Italian and German translation. The present book is filled out (...) with the translator's critical Introduction, "The esoteric Quine?" a bibliography based on Quine's sources, and an Index for the volume. (shrink)

Our only channel of information about the world is the impact of external forces on our sensory surfaces. So says science itself. There is no clairvoyance. How, then, can we have parlayed this meager sensory input into a full-blown scientific theory of the world? This is itself a scientific question. The pursuit of it, with free use of scientific theory, is what I call naturalized epistemology. The Roots of Reference falls within that domain. Its more specific concern, within that domain, (...) is reference to concrete and abstract objects: what such reference consists in, and how we achieve it. (shrink)

Besides serving us at the growing edge of science and beyond, metaphor figures even in our first learning of language; or, if not quite metaphor, something akin to it. We hear a word or phrase on some occasion, or by chance we babble a fair approximate ourselves on what happens to be a pat occasion and are applauded for it. On a later occasion, then, one that resembles the first occasion by our lights, we repeat the expression. Resemblance of occasions (...) is what matters, here as in metaphor. We generalize our application of the expression by degrees of subjective resemblance of occasions, until we discover from other people's behavior that we have pushed analogy too far and exceeded the established usage. If the crux of metaphor is creative extension through analogy, then we have forged a metaphor at each succeeding application of that early word of phrase. These primitive metaphors differ from the deliberate and sophisticated ones, however, in that they accrete directly to our growing store of standard usage. They are metaphors stillborn. It is a mistake, then, to think of linguistic usage as literalistic in its main body and metaphorical in its trimming. Metaphor, or something like it, governs both the growth of language and our acquisition of it. What comes as a subsequent refinement is rather cognitive discourse itself, at its most dryly literal. The neatly worked inner stretches of science are an open space in the tropical jungle, created by clearing tropes away. W. V. Quine is the Edgar Pierce professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard University. His many influential works include Methods of Logic, Word and Object, and The Roots of Reference. "On the Nature of Moral Values," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Spring 1979 issue. (shrink)

In this second lecture, Quine provides a further rational reconstruction of human progress from sensory stimulation to our current scientific theory. This project consists in his further speculations concerning how we have acquired cognitive language. Here, Quine talks of observation sentences and explains how he thinks they can be learned by ostension. This leads him to further speculate concerning how we could master standing sentences, predication and the use of relative clauses. At this stage the language learner has acquired a (...) grammar that is equivalent to first order predicate calculus, which Quine famously advocates as the canonical framework for the language of science. He elaborates on the nature of objective reference, emphasizing that this appears with the predication of general terms since only then are things separated from the terms that name them. (shrink)

SummaryMetatheory may be pursued immanently, i.e., within the object language, or transcendently in metalanguages. Immanently, the hierarchy of metalanguages gives way to a hierarchy of predicates. The immanent approach accentuates the symmetry between Russell's paradox and Cantor's theorem: class shortage versus predicate shortage. Appeal to metatheoretic models, in defining logical truth, gives way to appeal to substitutions of expressions of the object language. Can this be said also of set‐theoretic truth, despite predicate shortage? Equivalently: is substitutional quantification unscathed by predicate (...) shortage? Anyway substitutional quantification balks at impredicative cases. (shrink)