E!! The True Conservative Story™

14/15 The last one about the water not composed of H20 was the one I got wrong, but I don’t think we should count it since it is admittedly “controversial” in philosophic circles.

“Invalid. Invalid but controversial in philosophical circles. If one defines water as a property that contains two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen only, then the argument above is valid. However, it is possible also that there may exist a substance that looks like water, boils as water, freezes as water, nourishes plants and life as water, and yet has a different chemical composition to what we know as water. There is nothing that could logically prevent this possibility occurring so the argument then becomes invalid.”

I am of the school that says that water should be defined in terms of H20, and I have a problem with the idea of a substance of different chemical properties that behaves exactly the same as water in all situations.

a)A water molecule is defined as 2 Hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom.
b)Ron believes anything outside the definition is not water.

Ron only got 14 out of 15

0 Valid 0 Invalid

Ron’s last blog post..My Carbon Footprint

I’m ok with both sets of reasoning above. The reason I went with “invalid” is different from the one allowed and is probably somewhat outside the rules of logic.

It is quite possible that water will one day be defined as something other/more than 2 H’s and 1 O. For instance, there may be unknown/unseen particles, or certain yet undiscovered forces, that are also part and parcel (necessary) to make what we currently define as water. If so we will simply add them to the definition of water rather than changing the sign, symbol, or idea. (See string theory for how this could be true.)

Or, we may, somewhere in the universe, discover a chemical composition that is so close to our current definition of water that we will still call it water (or maybe water+, or water27, or Epsalon moon water).

15/15 =)