Living Water Author(s): Joseph Laporte Source: Mind, New Series, Vol. 107, No. 426, (Apr., 1998), pp. 451-455 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2659887 Accessed: 02/05/2008 20:38 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We enable the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected].
http://www.jstor.org
Living Water JOSEPHLAPORTE
In a recent defense of the Kripke (1972)-Putnam (1975) position that water is H20, BarbaraAbbott (1997) deploys Gricean considerations to explain away refractoryreference to such substances as tears and tea. The problem she addresses issues from the apparentfact, noted by various critics of the position that water is H20 (e.g. Zemach 1976, Aune 1994), that a sample does not have to be pure H20 to be water.Waterfrom the ocean, for example, contains salt, but it is still water.Indeed, even the purest samples of water for the collecting are not completely H20. 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 straightH20. Nevertheless, there are less precise standards for certain uses of "water",or looser senses of "water".Thus, "water"can ordinarilyrefer to H20 plus or minus a few impurities. But when do impurities spoil the water-status of a sample containing H20, and when, on the other hand, are they to be overlooked? The indication generally given is that, on the appropriatelyqualified view that water is H20, impurities are tolerable when they are sufficiently 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 qualification (Putnam 1988, p. 31; see also pp. 35-6). Putnam's critics have tried to show that H20 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 H20 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; H20 content is insufficient (Malt 1994, pp. 43, 66). Chomsky similarly suggests that the high H20 content of liquids like coffee and tea, which are not water, shows that H20 content does not suffice to determine the reference of "water". He likewise finds a role for human concerns (Chomsky 1995; see esp. pp. 22-3). Mind, Vol. 107 . 426 . April 1998
C)Oxford University Press 1998
452 JosephLaPorte Abbott is unconvinced by these criticisms. She maintains, it seems, that "water"refers to just what possesses a sufficient proportion of H20, and that other factors of special human interest are of no consequence.1With 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 H20 content, then why aren't tears, Sprite, and tea-water?For these liquids are largely composed of H20: indeed, it is suggested, tears may have exactly the composition of the Pacific Ocean. Abbott's resourceful suggestion is that tears and other such substances are water.We just don't 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 apparentlytakes 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 attributinga borderline status or worse to tea and Sprite will not do, but troublesjust 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 significantly higher in the Great Salt Lake in Utah and other mineral-rich bodies of water. Watercan hold surprisingquantities 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 standardthereby set qualifies 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. 313-4). Abbott indicates in several places that the altemative she has in mind is the usual view thatjust H 0 content determines the reference of "water". "As the perceived proportion of water [i.e. H20] 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 H20 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 H20 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 alternativeaccount according to which "the appearance of ambiguity ... depending on the amount of impurities in question is actually a reflection of different implicit standards of precision" (p. 317; see also p. 31 1).
Living Water 453
to mention a jellyfish, would all pass. The content of Utah's 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-H2 0 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 H20.)2 Of course, you do consume water eating a tomato, but not much follows from that. You also consume water when you eat baked sunflower seeds (at about five percent water). Sunflower 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, standardsfor 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 H20. It does not refer to tea. (So movie talk of tea as water plus tea (Abbott, pp. 315-6) is scant supportfor the thesis that tea is water.) At issue is whether the above objects just straightforwardlyare 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 "thatcrying 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 H20 content that determines the reference of "water", the above expressions succeed in referring to the baby, the chicken, and the tomatoes, just as straightforwardlyas "water from that lake" succeeds in referringto lake water.3Our disposition to say that these organic objects are not water is to be explained by appeal to pragmatics. 2See Gardner(1982, pp. 5 1-2 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. 106-15).
3Of 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.
454 Joseph LaPorte
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 Abbott's own plausible observations concerning the water-status of innocuous substances like holy water. Indeed, it seems likely enough that factors such as function, naturalsource, and observable behavior play a role in the failure of the relevant objects to share the water-statusof water from ponds and lakes. None of this tells againstAbbott's plausible claim that "water"is vague. Though "water"could be vague in such a way that H20 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 H20 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".Theexamples 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 H20 content alone matters. Abbott's suggestion that Gricean considerations restore the plausibility of this simple position in the face of refractoryreferentialpractices has been rejected. Perhaps an account involving no appeal to human interests and concerns, some account other than that on which simple H20 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 jlaportegphilos. umass.edu
JOSEPH LAPORTE
REFERENCES Abbott, Barbara 1997: "A Note on the Nature of 'Water"'.Mind, 106, pp. 311-9. 'For beneficial discussion I owe special thanks to Bruce Aune, who has effectively called my attention to difficulties attending attempts to discount impurities. I also thank Phillip Bricker. For helpful comments on an earlier draft I thank an anonymous referee.
Living Water 455
Aune, Bruce 1994: "Determinate Meaning and Analytic Truth", in G. Debrock and M. Hulswit, eds., Living Doubt. The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 55-65. Chomsky, Noam 1995: "Language and Nature".Mind, 104, pp. 1-61. 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. 253-355. 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 H20". Cognitive Psychology, 27, pp. 41-70. Putnam, Hilary 1975: "The Meaning of 'Meaning"', in his Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers,Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 215-71. 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: "Putnam's Theory on the Reference of Substance Terms".Journal of Philosophy, 73, pp. 116-27.
