Today’s philosophical insight is about how the meaning of the words we use is intimately tied with our experiences of what these words denote.
Suppose that you are living in the beginning of the 19th century. You use water on a daily basis and talk about it in your language. You believe that you know what you mean when you use the term “water”.
In 1811 Avogadro discovers that water is H2O. You now know that when you are using water you are using H2O and when you are talking about water you are talking about H2O. So if water now means H2O and if until now you didn’t know that water was H2O, does that mean that until now you didn’t know what water meant?
Well, no. The mistake in that argument is that water does not MEAN H2O even now that we know that it IS H2O. Water may be H2O, but H2O is not what we mean when we talk about water (unless if we’re a chemist, perhaps). When we talk about water what we mean is that colourless, tasteless liquid that quenches our thirst, is wet, and can be used to wash things. It also rains from the sky. In that regard your post-1811 understanding of water does not differ from your pre-1811 understanding.
Another example is “Boris Johnson” and “the current British Prime Minister”. Even though Boris Johnson IS the current British Prime Minister (in jargon, the two are “coextensive”), “Boris Johnson” does not MEAN “the current British Prime Minister” (the two terms have different “intensions”).
What these cases show us is that the meaning of words have to do with how we experience the things that they refer to, rather than anything metaphysically deeper about them. It doesn’t matter what water’s chemical composition is; what matters is how we experience water. Our experience of water is what “water” is.
In part 2 I will use this analysis to show how this dispels a common misunderstanding and how sometimes what seem like paradoxes are really just a misuse of language.
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