Talk:Water

Article Checklist for "Water"

Workgroup category or categories	Physics Workgroup, Chemistry Workgroup [Editors asked to check categories]
Article status	Stub: no more than a few sentences
Underlinked article?	Yes
Basic cleanup done?	No
Checklist last edited by	--Robert W King 11:54, 22 August 2007 (CDT)

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Wip

--Robert W King 12:23, 22 August 2007 (CDT)

Possible References:

• http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/WeighingWater/
• http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/molecule.html
• http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/characteristics.html

Elements

There are four "elements" of the earth--water, fire, wind, and earth itself; I have tried to alleviate any potential confusion by adding "non-chemical" element, and I hope it suits. --Robert W King 12:36, 23 August 2007 (CDT)

"Non-chemical" does not make sense. See my edit summary. Michael Hardy 17:16, 24 August 2007 (CDT)

Definition of water

On the question of the definition of water: interestingly, in the philosophy of language, it is often discussed as an example what the meaning of "water" is (particularly, whether H20 is the "definition" of water--Putnam asked, if you came across something on "Twin Earth" that had the same observable properties as water, but was not H20, would that be water?). This is perhaps irrelevant, except in this general point: to speak of the definition of words for what philosophers call "natural kinds" (like water) is highly problematic. This does not mean that the words cannot be given definitions (obviously, they can), but rather that the criteria one might use to decide what is an "objective definition," so to speak, are not at all clear. And then of course most philosophers, following Wittgenstein and Quine, would in fact deny that words for natural kinds could be given definitions at all.

I suspect that asserting that water "by definition" is or is not liquid belies any understanding of these issues. Many people do mean something liquid when they speak of water, but maybe that's just because that's how water usually is when we encounter it. Anyway, if water were a liquid "by definition," then it would be contradictory to speak of frozen water, or water in a gaseous state. Clearly, that is not (always) contradictory, because we do use those phrases with good sense. --Larry Sanger 20:18, 24 August 2007 (CDT)