abott 1999

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Water =H O 2Author(s): Barbara Abbott Source: Mind, Vol. 108, No. 429 (Jan., 1999), pp. 145-148Published by: on behalf of the Oxford University Press Mind AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2659906Accessed: 03-11-2015 11:13 UTC

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Water =H20

BARBARA ABBOTT

Water = H20. It follows that something is H20 to the extent that it is water and vice versa. Whether we call something "water" or not, however, depends on more than just the percentage of water it consists of. A key consideration is whether there is another name for it (whether it is also something else), and that is determined by the other properties of the thing in question plus human interests and concerns which play no role in determining the extension of the term "water".

In view of the fact that many kinds of things, including babies, chickens, and tomatoes, contain a higher proportion of water than Utah's Great Salt Lake, Joseph LaPorte asks: "when do impurities spoil the water-status of a sample containing H20, and when, on the other hand, are they to be overlooked?" (LaPorte 1998, p. 451). In addition to setting up a false opposition between being overlooked and spoiling the water-status, LaPorte is using the term "impurity" in an odd way. The non-water parts of a baby, a chicken or a tomato are not impurities but rather essential ele- ments which make each kind of thing different from lake water and from the other kinds. On the other hand the Great Salt Lake just contains an especially high proportion of the salt and other kinds of minerals that are found in 97 percent of the world's water. These are impurities and do not help to constitute a separate kind, other than the general fact that salt water may be considered a separate kind from fresh water.

Nevertheless we learn that the baby itself, the tomato, the chicken, are more purely water than the Great Salt Lake! Who would have thought it? But it is true! Contrary to appearances, their other parts do not make it the case that they are less water than the Great Salt Lake, do not "spoil their water-status".

Pragmatic reasons why we do not call babies, tomatoes and chickens "water" are not far to seek. One obvious one is that most people do not know that these things have such a high water content. But even if that were common knowledge we would still need to use different terms for these different things because it almost always makes a difference to our purposes. When I ask for some water there is a good likelihood that a bucketful from the Great Salt Lake will meet my needs better than a tomato-if I want to douse a small fire, say, though not if I want to water the begonias. And when we are interested in babies then chances are very great that chickens or

Mind, Vol. 108 . 429 . January 1999 (D Oxford University Press 1999


146 Barbara Abbot

tomatoes definitely will not do instead, much less a bucket of water. Even in a salad someone might care strongly to have lettuce and not spinach. That is why we have different names for these things in the first place. Of course human interests and concerns figure strongly in these naming practices.

If it were true that any given object could only belong to one kind, then something which was a baby or a tomato could not also be water, and the extension of "water" would be hedged all around by human interests and concerns. The antecedent of this conditional is false, as Clucky the Leg- horn (who is also a chicken, a pet, a bird, an animal) attests. However our tendency to refer to things using basic level terms ("chicken", in the case of Clucky) may lend an appearance of truth to the antecedent and thus an appearance of soundness to an argument for such a conclusion.

LaPorte offers a different reason for asserting those conclusions-his intuitions. It "seems incredible" to him that an infant falls in the extension of water (p. 453), so he thinks that it is false rather than true but strange to describe a baby as "water". But a rather large literature stands testimony to the fact that intuitions concerning what is semantic as opposed to what is pragmatic are not reliable. (See e.g. Horn (1996) and the works cited there.)

Let us consider anyway the claim that "factors such as function, natural source, and observable behaviour play a role" in determining the extension of "water" (p. 454). LaPorte does not specify in any more detail what the factors are or what role they play. (Chomsky (1995) and Malt (1994) were also vague on the specifics of this approach.) The idea seems to be that water is H20 which is in a stereotypical location or serving a stereotypical function-say in a lake or an ocean, or being drunk out of a glass. But now LaPorte's comment that earthworms, jellyfish, and chickens are "composed mainly of water" (LaPorte 1998, p. 453) would be false, since the H20 comprising these animals is not in a stereotypical location or serving a stereotypical function. This is not a good outcome.

The only escape that is mentioned by Chomsky, Malt, or LaPorte is to retreat to the position that "water" is ambiguous, meaning pure H20 on one interpretation, and impure H20 which is in a stereotypical location or serving a stereotypical function, on the other. But no independent evidence has been given in favour of this claim, nor have replies been offered to the arguments given against it' (see Abbott 1997, pp. 316-7).

'Jessica Brown says "Abbot [sic] (1997) discusses the issue of whether 'water' literally applies to both pure and impure samples and concludes that 'water' literally applies only to pure water" (Brown 1998, p. 282, fn. 9). I was startled by this state- ment. The word "literally" does not appear in my paper and in ?4 I paraphrased Lewis's (1979) reply to Unger (1975) with what I thought was evident approval. I said "for a particular claim to be true in a given situation it is only required that the local standard of precision be met" (Abbott 1997, p. 317). In ordinary conver- sation "water" applies as literally to what is in the Nile as "my car" does to my car (including all the junk that's in it).


Water = H20 147

With respect to the phrases "that crying water in the crib", "clucking ... water in the coop", and "the growing water", LaPorte remarks:

On the view that it is just H20 content that determines the refer- ence of "water", the above expressions succeed in referring to the baby, the chicken, and the tomatoes, just as straightforwardly as "water from that lake" succeeds in referring to lake water. (LaPorte 1998, p. 453, emphasis added.)

Not so, since there is another factor here. Wholes are more than the sum of their parts, and what we can predicate of a whole may be different from what we can predicate of its parts. My telephone is 80 percent plastic. It is ringing. Is the plastic ringing? To the extent that the answer to this question is "No", to that extent is it not straightforward that we can predicate crying, clucking, and growing of the water which largely constitutes a baby, a chicken, and a tomato, respectively. By the same token we cannot predicate roundness of the water in Round Lake.

LaPorte says: "To expect pragmatic considerations to smooth over the oddity of the above references is expecting too much" (LaPorte 1998, p. 454). I have cited an additional fact (properties like clucking and growing may be predicable of wholes but not the substances which constitute them) but I also think he underestimates the strength of pragmatic considerations. In addition to the nonobviousness of their high water content, the fact that babies, chickens and tomatoes belong to separate and distinct kinds which we use in different ways and have different names for is a powerful factor. There is a comparable oddity in suggesting that someone "shut that wood" (referring to a 90 percent wooden door), or "put the books on that steel" (referring to a 100 percent steel bookshelf). Is LaPorte prepared to deny that the door is in the extension of "wood", or the bookshelf in the extension of "steel"? In that case there might be noth- ing left in the extension of "steel" at all.

Let me summarize our possibilities. On the one hand we can claim that water = H20. (Our main problem then will be explaining to friends with a straight face what the purpose of our paper is.) We can note that most of the things we call "water" are not pure water, but that in that respect water is like almost everything else we come into contact with in everyday life. We also learn that many things that do not seem like water at all, things like babies and chickens, actually contain a higher proportion of water (and thus are more purely water) than things we do call "water". Never- theless we can explain why, even if it were common knowledge that these things are largely water, we would not call them "water" and why it would sound very odd indeed to call them "water". Each of these things has other properties which make it a distinct kind, and the differences between these kinds are important to us and thus important to mark terminologically. In


148 Barbara Abbot

this respect "water" is not different from other substance terms like "plastic", "wood", and "steel".

On the other hand we have two alternatives (neither of which has been spelled out in detail). One would deny that water = H20 and assert instead that water is by definition a substance in a lake or ocean or being drunk or ... ? But then we would also have to deny the obvious truth that tomatoes and jellyfish and blood contain a very high proportion of water. The other alternative makes the unsupported and problematic claim that "water" is ambiguous. Neither of these alternatives seems very appealing.2

Department of Linguistics and BARBARA ABBOTT Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages Department of Philosophy Michigan State University A-614 Wells Hall East Lansing, MI 48824-1027 USA [email protected]

REFERENCES Abbott, Barbara 1997: "A Note on the Nature of 'Water"'. Mind, 106, pp.

311-9. Brown, Jessica 1998: "Natural Kind Terms and Recognitional Capaci-

ties". Mind, 107, pp. 275-303. Chomsky, Noam 1995: "Language and Nature". Mind, 104, pp. 1-61. Horn, Laurence R. 1996: "Presupposition and Implicature", in Shalom

The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, Oxford: Black- well Publishers, pp. 299-319.

LaPorte, Joseph 1998: "Living Water". Mind, 107, pp. 450-5. Lewis, David 1979: "Scorekeeping in a Language Game". Journal of

Philosophical Logic, 8, pp. 339-59. Malt, Barbara 1994: "Water Is NotH 20". Cognitive Psychology, 27, pp.

41-70. Unger, Peter 1976: Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

2I am very grateful to Aldo Antonelli, Gene Cline, Rich Hall, Larry Hauser, Larry Horn, Myles McNally, and Carol Slater for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.


Article Contentsp. [145]p. 146p. 147p. 148

Issue Table of ContentsMind, Vol. 108, No. 429, Jan., 1999Front MatterDisquotationalism and Infinite Conjunctions [pp. 1 - 22]On Some Arguments for the Necessity of Necessity [pp. 23 - 52]Persistence and Non-Supervenient Relations [pp. 53 - 67]Deflationism and Tarski's Paradise [pp. 69 - 94]Probabilistic Causation, Preemption and Counterfactuals [pp. 95 - 125]On the Structure of Higher-Order Vagueness [pp. 127 - 143]DiscussionsWater =H2O [pp. 145 - 148]Bundle Theory from A to B [pp. 149 - 156]

Book Reviewsuntitled [pp. 157 - 159]untitled [pp. 159 - 162]untitled [pp. 162 - 165]untitled [pp. 165 - 170]untitled [pp. 170 - 179]untitled [pp. 180 - 184]untitled [pp. 184 - 187]untitled [pp. 187 - 195]untitled [pp. 196 - 199]untitled [pp. 200 - 203]untitled [pp. 203 - 206]

Books Received [pp. 207 - 212]Announcements [pp. 213 - 216]Back Matter

abott 1999

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