Living Water

JOSEPH LAPORTE

In a recent defense of the Kripke (1972)-Putnam (1975) position that water is H2O, Barbara Abbott (1997) deploys Gricean considerations to explain away refractory reference to such substances as tears and tea. The problem she addresses issues from the apparent fact, noted by various critics of the position that water is H2O (e.g. Zemach 1976, Aune 1994), that a sample does not have to be pure H2O to be water. Water from the ocean, for example, contains salt, but it is still water. Indeed, even the purest samples of water for the collecting are not completely H2O. The usual means of accommodating this observation is by way of admitting the possibility of impurities. Under the strictest of implicit standards (Abbott 1997, p. 317), or perhaps in the strictest sense of the word (Putnam 1975, pp. 239ff; see also Chomsky 1995, p. 22), it is incorrect to call anything water but straight H2O. Nevertheless, there are less precise standards for certain uses of water, or looser senses of water. Thus, water can ordinarily refer to H2O plus or minus a few impurities. But when do impurities spoil the water-status of a sample containing H2O, and when, on the other hand, are they to be overlooked? The indication generally given is that, on the appropriately qualied view that water is H2O, impurities are tolerable when they are sufciently low in quantity. Putnam suggests such a picture with his proposal that there is a cutoff point at perhaps around twenty percent impurities, above which water would not apply without qualication (Putnam 1988, p. 31; see also pp. 356). Putnams critics have tried to show that H2O content is not enough to secure the reference of water in ordinary circumstances. Barbara Malt, for instance, reports that speakers beliefs about the proportion of H2O in various liquids like tears, Sprite, and water from the tap do not account well for which ones are called water (Malt 1994, pp. 41, 44ff). Malt concludes that various human interests, such as source, location, and function, go into determining what water applies to; H2O content is insufcient (Malt 1994, pp. 43, 66). Chomsky similarly suggests that the high H2O content of liquids like coffee and tea, which are not water, shows that H 2O content does not sufce to determine the reference of water. He likewise nds a role for human concerns (Chomsky 1995; see esp. pp. 223).
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Abbott is unconvinced by these criticisms. She maintains, it seems, that water refers to just what possesses a sufcient proportion of H2O, and that other factors of special human interest are of no consequence.1 With a view to defending her position against the likes of Malt and Chomsky, Abbott sets out to answer the question these critics raise: if, in less demanding contexts, water refers to impure substances depending on their H2O content, then why arent tears, Sprite, and tea water? For these liquids are largely composed of H2O: indeed, it is suggested, tears may have exactly the composition of the Pacic Ocean. Abbotts resourceful suggestion is that tears and other such substances are water. We just dont call them water. What we call a thing depends on our intentions in referring to it. Abbott mitigates the suspicion that her suggestion might allow water to apply too promiscuously by choosing tears and holy water as examples of water that is not so-called. These are more plausible examples of genuine water than tea and coffee, which she apparently takes for penumbral cases, observing that they may be on the edges of the water category to which tears and holy water belong (p. 316). The still more distant Sprite and Windex contain distinguishing additives to set them apart (p. 314). This reason for attributing a borderline status or worse to tea and Sprite will not do, but troubles just begin here. It will surely be hoped that blood should have crossed the line to non-water in virtue of being too thick. No such luck. The impurities in blood are only around ten percent. The level of impurities is signicantly higher in the Great Salt Lake in Utah and other mineral-rich bodies of water. Water can hold surprising quantities of impurities: indeed, a seven ounce cup of water can hold 40 or 50 teaspoons of salt before reaching its saturation point. (Compare the amount of coffee or tea in a cup.) Things get worse. If lake water is water (and this much is non-negotiable), then the standard thereby set qualies any number of familiar animals to count as impure bits of water: a frog, a chicken, an earthworm, not
For criticisms of Malt and Chomsky on the role of human interests, see Abbott (1997, pp. 3134). Abbott indicates in several places that the alternative she has in mind is the usual view that just H2O content determines the reference of water. As the perceived proportion of water [i.e. H2O] in a substance increases, she says, substances go from being non-water to being water, though sometimes to being water that is not so-called (p. 315; that water in the quote refers to H2O is made explicit on p. 316). To be sure, Abbott rejects the view that water is ambiguous in such a way that there are different uses of the term allowing for different levels of impurities. This does not involve her in rejecting the claim that H2O content is just what matters for reference, though; on the contrary, Abbott wants, by all appearances, to keep that claim but to accommodate it on an alternative account according to which the appearance of ambiguity depending on the amount of impurities in question is actually a reection of different implicit standards of precision (p. 317; see also p. 311).
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to mention a jellysh, would all pass. The content of Utahs famous lake (there are other comparable water bodies) gets up to nearly twenty-eight percent mineral matter. All of the above animals contain fewer non-H2O impurities, as do many plants and plant products, such as tomatoes. Closer to home, it seems incredible to suppose that an infant, which contains markedly fewer impurities than water from the above-mentioned lake, instantiates the water kind. (Adults, especially elderly and overweight ones, contain less H2O.)2 Of course, you do consume water eating a tomato, but not much follows from that. You also consume water when you eat baked sunower seeds (at about ve percent water). Sunower seeds, to be sure, are not composed mainly of water, while the other above-mentioned items are. Still, to say that a thing is composed mainly of water, or that it is mostly water, is not to say that it is water. On the contrary, when an object is said to be mostly water, standards for allowable impurities are thereby set too high to include the object in the extension of water on that use. If I say that my cup of tea is mostly water plus some tea, I clearly do not intend the water ingredient alone to include the tea. In such a context, water refers to (relatively) pure, tea-less H2O. It does not refer to tea. (So movie talk of tea as water plus tea (Abbott, pp. 3156) is scant support for the thesis that tea is water.) At issue is whether the above objects just straightforwardly are bits of water, not whether they contain water. Now consider a conversation in which participants discuss water in typical fashion, without bothering to be too wary about impurities. Water from muddy ponds, or water from salty areas of the earth, may be at issue. Someone indicates that it is time to tend to that crying water in the crib (a baby). Or perhaps, to give the discussion a bucolic setting, it is announced that the time has come to cut off the head of that clucking, messy water in the coop (a chicken) and roast it, or to pick the growing water (tomatoes) off the vines out back. On the view that it is just H2O content that determines the reference 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.3 Our disposition to say that these organic objects are not water is to be explained by appeal to pragmatics.
2 See Gardner (1982, pp. 512 and p. 146) on the water content of humans, including human blood, and salty water, respectively. For the other examples appealed to in the text, see Leopold, Davis, and the editors of Time-Life Books (1980, pp. 10615). 3 Of course, the reference at issue here is semantic reference. It is true but irrelevant that a person could succeed in communicating something about a baby in the above way, as many descriptions the baby fails to satisfy would work for this purpose.

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It seems much more likely, however, that the relevant organic objects do not belong to the extension of water, or at least that there is no semantic fact of the matter that they do. To expect pragmatic considerations to smooth over the oddity of the above references is expecting too much: it is surely overextending the usefulness of Abbotts own plausible observations concerning the water-status of innocuous substances like holy water. Indeed, it seems likely enough that factors such as function, natural source, and observable behavior play a role in the failure of the relevant objects to share the water-status of water from ponds and lakes. None of this tells against Abbotts plausible claim that water is vague. Though water could be vague in such a way that H2O content is the only factor accounting for its reference, the term could certainly also be vague in such a way that human interests and concerns play a role in determining the reference of the word. (Similarly, on the rival view that water is ambiguous, the reference of the term might involve just H2O content, or it might in most cases involve other factors as well.) But Abbott would like to avoid saying that human interests and concerns figure into the reference of water.The examples above certainly reveal limits for options along such lines. The most salient and generally discussed view according to which human interests and concerns do not matter for the reference of that term is the view that H2O content alone matters. Abbotts suggestion that Gricean considerations restore the plausibility of this simple position in the face of refractory referential practices has been rejected. Perhaps an account involving no appeal to human interests and concerns, some account other than that on which simple H2O content determines reference, could be plausibly articulated. If so, Abbott gives no indication of what that account might be.4 Department of Philosophy Bartlett Hall University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Box 30525 Amherst MA 01003-0525 USA jlaporte@philos.umass.edu REFERENCES Abbott, Barbara 1997: A Note on the Nature of Water. Mind, 106, pp. 3119.
4 For benecial discussion I owe special thanks to Bruce Aune, who has effectively called my attention to difculties attending attempts to discount impurities. I also thank Phillip Bricker. For helpful comments on an earlier draft I thank an anonymous referee.

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Aune, Bruce 1994: Determinate Meaning and Analytic Truth, in G. Debrock and M. Hulswit, eds., Living Doubt. The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 5565. Chomsky, Noam 1995: Language and Nature. Mind, 104, pp. 161. Gardner, Robert 1982: Water: The Life Sustaining Resource . New York: J. Messner. Kripke, Saul 1972: Naming and Necessity, in Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, eds., Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, pp. 253355. Leopold, Luna, Kenneth Davis, and the editors of Time-Life Books 1980: Water. Revised ed. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books. Malt, Barbara 1994: Water Is Not H2O. Cognitive Psychology, 27, pp. 4170. Putnam, Hilary 1975: The Meaning of Meaning, in his Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers,Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21571. Orignally published in 1975 in K. Gunderson (ed.) Language, Mind and Knowledge, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 7. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. 1988: Representation and Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zemach, Eddy 1976: Putnams Theory on the Reference of Substance Terms. Journal of Philosophy, 73, pp. 11627.

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