I’m reading a Kratzer that deals with inherent modality. She discusses some suffixes in German which make adjectives out of verbs, roughly analagous to -able in English. So I started thinking about edible, and whether the semantic content requires that it only modify items which would cause no ill effects if ingested. Various dictionary definitions assert that it describes something “fit” or “suitable” for eating. Are oleander leaves edible? They are extremely toxic and can cause death if eaten, so perhaps they do not count as “edible” and yet it’s clear that they can be eaten: just put some in your mouth, chew, and swallow. I’m still not convinced that the meaning of edible is anything beyond “can be eaten;” I think we tend to use it to describe that which a human can ingest without harm, but there are clear counter-examples to this where the use of edible is completely licensed. Every year on January 1, some number of Japanese people choke to death eating a holiday soup containing mochi, large blobs of glutinous rice. They eat the mochi, which is edible, and yet it causes harm. So on this account, oleander leaves should be edible as well, because one can eat them, but they end up causing harm. Forgive the pun but I think this boils down to my overwhelming tendency this semester to seek out pragmatic explanations and leave the semantics underdetermined.
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