Here are the claims:
A. Water is H2O.
B. Water and ice are the same stuff.
C. Water freezes at 0 ˚C and 1 atm pressure.
D. Water will melt the Wicked Witch of the West. (Fortunately, we now have her in captivity.)
E. Water is not a good conductor of electricty.
Recall that an analytic claim is true or false just based on the meanings of the terms in it, while a synthetic claim is true or false based on the meanings of its terms AND on facts in the world.
So, for each of these claims the key issue will be what exactly the meaning of "water" includes.
Here are claims that are clearly synthetic:
E. Water is not a good conductor of electricty.
Nothing about the meaning of "water" includes being a bad (or good) conductor; you'd have to check to see.
D. Water will melt the Wicked Witch of the West. (Fortunately, we now have her in captivity.)
Same here. Ability to melt witches might be an additional property of water we could discover empirically, but it's not built into the definition of "water" (or "witch").
Here is a claim that is probably synthetic:
B. Water and ice are the same stuff.
We encounter water; we encounter ice. The first time we see one transformed into another, it may be a bit surprising. Since "water" is usually used to indicate the liquid we drink, bathe in, etc., and "ice" is used to indicate the stuff that people skate on or put into their drinks, I think you can make the case that "same stuff as ice" isn't part of the meaning of "water". Rather, that the two are interconvertable is an additional fact we have learned from our experience of the world.
Here's a claim you might expect to be synthetic that is actually analytic:
C. Water freezes at 0 ˚C and 1 atm pressure.
The precise conditions under which water freezes are surely determined empirically, so it would seem reasonable to identify this claim as synthetic. However, it turns out to be analytic because it is part of the definition of the Celsius temperature scale that the zero point is the temperature at which water at 1 atm pressure (normal "sea level" atmospheric pressure) freezes. (In other words, this claim is analytic because of what is built into the meaning of 0 ˚C .)
Finally, what to say about "Water is H2O."
"Water" is a term that has been in use for a very long time, certainly much longer than we've had any notion of elements like hydrogen and oxygen. Indeed, once the elements had been discovered, it required experimentation to determine what water's elemental composition was. This argues strongly for classifying "Water is H2O" as a synthetic claim.
Of course, nowadays it seems like everyone knows water is H2O, and perhaps even that this fact is so important that it has become the definition of water. This might make you inclined to say this claim is an analytic one. However, then we might need to account for how the meaning of "water" was reset from its meaning prior to the discovery of its elemental composition. (In other words, how did a claim that was once a synthetic claim become an analytic claim?) At the very least, we'd have to consider the question of what fixes the meaning of "water". And, we might go along with Quine here and say that there might not be a clear analytic/synthetic distinction here.
A. Water is H2O.
B. Water and ice are the same stuff.
C. Water freezes at 0 ˚C and 1 atm pressure.
D. Water will melt the Wicked Witch of the West. (Fortunately, we now have her in captivity.)
E. Water is not a good conductor of electricty.
Recall that an analytic claim is true or false just based on the meanings of the terms in it, while a synthetic claim is true or false based on the meanings of its terms AND on facts in the world.
So, for each of these claims the key issue will be what exactly the meaning of "water" includes.
Here are claims that are clearly synthetic:
E. Water is not a good conductor of electricty.
Nothing about the meaning of "water" includes being a bad (or good) conductor; you'd have to check to see.
D. Water will melt the Wicked Witch of the West. (Fortunately, we now have her in captivity.)
Same here. Ability to melt witches might be an additional property of water we could discover empirically, but it's not built into the definition of "water" (or "witch").
Here is a claim that is probably synthetic:
B. Water and ice are the same stuff.
We encounter water; we encounter ice. The first time we see one transformed into another, it may be a bit surprising. Since "water" is usually used to indicate the liquid we drink, bathe in, etc., and "ice" is used to indicate the stuff that people skate on or put into their drinks, I think you can make the case that "same stuff as ice" isn't part of the meaning of "water". Rather, that the two are interconvertable is an additional fact we have learned from our experience of the world.
Here's a claim you might expect to be synthetic that is actually analytic:
C. Water freezes at 0 ˚C and 1 atm pressure.
The precise conditions under which water freezes are surely determined empirically, so it would seem reasonable to identify this claim as synthetic. However, it turns out to be analytic because it is part of the definition of the Celsius temperature scale that the zero point is the temperature at which water at 1 atm pressure (normal "sea level" atmospheric pressure) freezes. (In other words, this claim is analytic because of what is built into the meaning of 0 ˚C .)
Finally, what to say about "Water is H2O."
"Water" is a term that has been in use for a very long time, certainly much longer than we've had any notion of elements like hydrogen and oxygen. Indeed, once the elements had been discovered, it required experimentation to determine what water's elemental composition was. This argues strongly for classifying "Water is H2O" as a synthetic claim.
Of course, nowadays it seems like everyone knows water is H2O, and perhaps even that this fact is so important that it has become the definition of water. This might make you inclined to say this claim is an analytic one. However, then we might need to account for how the meaning of "water" was reset from its meaning prior to the discovery of its elemental composition. (In other words, how did a claim that was once a synthetic claim become an analytic claim?) At the very least, we'd have to consider the question of what fixes the meaning of "water". And, we might go along with Quine here and say that there might not be a clear analytic/synthetic distinction here.
"Observation and Meaning"
"Duhem/Quine theses"
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