...

Your point?

You're a bit of a dill, really.

I'll try again. J and I are talking on a PM, not a forum page, about issues hereabouts, in order to avoid irrelevant shite posts such as these.

And he will have understood the suggestion that we keep the discussion of that question until we get through our discussion in PM.

Have you more to say on a topic that does not concern you? Please feel free to keep it to yourself.

Posts like this are a part of the reason that @J and I moved our conversation to the PMs. J. would have understood that. Butt out. nothing to do with you.

Let's see what response this post elicits. — Banno

Mmmm.

But I'm addicted, so I will.

And you will just say... what was it? That I treat every comment as a linguistic trap? Goes with the territory.

So you want to change "1. Faith involves acting on belief without sufficient evidence" to "P1: “Faith is belief in something without empirical or rational justification.” Can you see how this turns the characterisation of faith into a stipulated definition? Instead of "faith includes this" you have "faith is this". Can you see how your edit changes the emphasis to belief, and from action? But the point here is to bring out the immoral acts that are sometimes the result of faith unfettered.

So no, that's not a reasonable alteration.

Cheers.

Now if we could relate that back to your OP...

Banno, is it possible you are a little biased against me? — Fire Ologist

Of course that's possible. But on thinking about it, early on I didn't give much attention to your views simply becasue what you were attempting to say was way off. You commenced misrepresenting me from very early in this conversation. Look at . And this:

You sound to me like you have no idea what faith is. And no curiosity. — Fire Ologist

I'm offering this not as part of a "you hit me back first" argument, but to point out that sometimes biases are learned.

And I have very little time for Leon, who certainly posts in bad faith. That you fell in with him in my opinion shows poor judgement.

41 pages. The topic is not that interesting.

Why should I engage further?

Oh goodness.

Perhaps logical space is broader than just consistency? It seems we might be able to wander away from the safe shore of possible worlds out on to the ocean of impossible worlds.

Beyond the pale for some, no doubt.

But before we go there, perhaps there are two completely consistent mathematics, the one on the left in which Goldbach's Conjecture is true; and the one on the right in which it is false.

Which one is true? Which one is right? Those question ceases to make sense. They are both true and yet incompatible. Logical space ceases to look like a unified whole, resembling instead a patchwork of frameworks, each with its own truths, rules, and meanings.

I think that's wonderful. @Count Timothy von Icarus won't like it.

You are repeating the very same errors already addressed. It's not worth my time to respond yet again. Diminishing returns.

If any one else sees a problem so far unaddressed, let me know.

As long as we don't use this to settle an argument or determine that it's true for everyone — Tom Storm

Yep! That seems to be the key.

It occures to me that, were one to suppose that there is exactly one truth, then those who disagree are indeed wrong, even if you can't say why; and as such the psychology as to why they accept such wrong views might seem more important than the reasons that those views are wrong - allowing one to dismiss views contrary to one's own becasue of who proffers them.

Enter Jordan Peterson, Iain McGilchrist, and John Vervaeke.

Excellent article - thanks. What did you take away from it?

I can't help it either. — Tom Storm

:smile:

There's the argument that such talk provides broad maps of where we are in the intellectual and cultural landscape. As such it's not true or false so much as useful or indicative, and justifiable on those grounds, perhaps.

There's also the point, made a few times by a few folk, that the motivation for some position is (usually) not relevant to the validity of the position.

's Nagel, even if he is right, makes no difference to the content of the arguments involved.

That stuff about psychologising, again.

"the gladiatorial theory of philosophy" — J

"Are you not entertained?"

Entertainment is also a large part of the discussion here in the forum. It's cold outside and I can write this post between chess games and Stelaris.

I asked ChatGPT to summarise my argument in this thread. Here's the result.

Banno's argument that faith may bring about immoral acts unfolds through a critical and pragmatic lens, emphasizing the consequences of acting on belief without sufficient justification. His argument can be outlined as follows:

1. Faith involves acting on belief without sufficient evidence
Premise: Faith, particularly religious or blind faith, is often characterized by belief in something without (or beyond) empirical or rational justification.
Banno frequently targets faith that forgoes critical evaluation, emphasizing that such belief is often sustained despite contrary evidence or lack of evidence.

2. Actions based on such faith can have real-world consequences
Premise: Beliefs are not isolated—they lead to actions.
Faith is not a passive attitude but something that motivates behavior, often with social or moral implications.

3. Those consequences can be harmful or immoral
Premise: Because faith-based actions bypass critical scrutiny, they can lead to outcomes that violate ethical norms or cause real harm.
Examples alluded to in discussion:
Religious extremism
Faith-driven violence or discrimination
Obedience to divine commands (e.g., Abraham and Isaac) without moral deliberation

4. Therefore, faith is not inherently virtuous and can lead to immorality
Conclusion: Faith, contrary to popular or religious belief, is not a moral good in itself. Instead, its value depends on its consequences.
Banno argues that faith should be assessed pragmatically—by its effects in the world—not held as a virtue independent of outcomes.

Supporting moves in his argument:
He challenges interlocutors who define faith as inherently good or virtuous.
He uses philosophical and theological examples (e.g., Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac) to show how acts praised as faithful might, under ordinary moral reasoning, be considered repugnant or immoral.
He stresses that if one is "never fully informed", then acting on such incomplete faith is especially dangerous.

Meta-point: Faith resists correction
Another subtle but important part of Banno's critique is that faith-based beliefs are resistant to revision, since they are often held as immune to counterevidence.
This makes it harder to check or restrain immoral consequences once someone is acting in faith.


Summary:
Banno’s structure is a pragmatic-ethical critique:
Faith motivates action
Action has consequences
Faith bypasses critical scrutiny
Therefore, it can lead to harmful consequences
Thus, faith is not inherently good and may be a source of immorality — ChatGPT

Not too bad a rendering.

I then asked it to list replies to this argument. Here's an edit:

Others argue that faith is a rational response when evidence is lacking but action is required. They suggest that faith allows individuals to make decisions and maintain emotional stability in the face of uncertainty.

Some contributors redefine faith as trust in authority or societal systems, which is often necessary for functioning in complex societies. This interpretation challenges the notion that faith is exclusively religious or inherently prone to leading to immoral acts.

Another line of response views faith as an a-rational or experiential phenomenon that transcends empirical evidence. Participants discuss faith in terms of personal experience, intuition, or as a necessary component of certain practices like Zen koans. This perspective suggests that faith can be a meaningful and purposeful aspect of human experience, not necessarily leading to immorality.

Some forum members express concern that Banno's argument may oversimplify the concept of faith by focusing solely on its potential for harm. They advocate for a more nuanced understanding that considers the various forms and functions of faith in human life. This highlights the complexity of defining faith and the importance of context in evaluating its moral implications. — ChatGPT

Pretty nuanced.

The justification for doing this is that folk have suggested that I haven't presented an argument. Here it is, summarised by an algorithm.

In Watkins' terms evolution is both confirmable and influential. Also, it risks being show to not match the data, unlike creationism in it's various forms. As Haldane pointed out, finding a rabbit fossil in Precambrian rock formations would be a knockout. But there aren't any.

Evolution is not strictly falsifiable - only universal statements are strictly falsifiable. That was what Popper was drawing attention to in his 1974 article, "Scientific Reduction and the Essential Tension". But the many misunderstandings of that comment brought out a later retraction.

He didn't change his mind, he clarified his point.

I think... — Wayfarer

You'd be wrong. And not just in laying the blame on David Lewis.

Modal metaphysics revives and deepens problems that are as real as any in classical thought. It offers precise tools for exploring essence, necessity, and counterfactuality—concepts classical metaphysics also wrestled with. And the charge of being "verbal" reflects a deflationary bias that the modal tradition explicitly resists.

But Banno's Rule applies: It is always easier to critique something if you begin by not understanding it. Your dismissal of modal metaphysics as “verbal” is a textbook case of strategic misunderstanding. You are trying to cut off a conversation that makes you uncomfortable, that cuts against your own views.

This site seems to contain a lot of strong voices advocating theism or views related to higher consciousness or transcendence. — Tom Storm

Well, have a look at the "philosophy" section in your bookshop. If there is one, it will almost certainly be between "self-help" and “religion"...

As long as the theists are not evangelising, or abusive, I don't mind. — Tom Storm

Nor do I, except that almost universally, when one points out a flaw in their position, the comeback is a denigration of the critic rather than a response to the criticism.

So I presented here a brief and fairly obvious criticism of faith. And here we are. @Hanover was the only one to address the actual argument presented.

Speculating: I think some theists believe they have read all the right philosophy and theology and have many of the answers and that modern secular culture is debased and decadent. They're probably angry about the state of the world, and when they encounter people with views they've identified as the cause of contemporary troubles, they lash out. — Tom Storm

That would be fine on Facebook.

Ah well. They will doubtless see this conversation as me stirring the possum. Perhaps it is. But I find it difficult not to see many of their comments as disingenuous, in bad faith.

, ... isn't it a bit rich for theists to seek out a place where there will be a lot of atheists, then complain that there are too many atheists?

Just plain rude.

So you prefer simple over correct? :wink:

Possible worlds are not so hard to understand. They are just stipulated models of how things might have been. So I might not have written this post - that can be modelled as that there is a possible world in which I didn't write this post. It's that simple. We can then go on to think about the consequences - like, in that possible world, since I didn't write this post, you didn't read it. But Charlie would still be King of England.

Using this, an essence can be seen as the properties a thing must have in every possible world in which it is found.

In most cases, that definition is much the same as the "qualities that make it what it is" version. But there are important differences.

And if one is going to play with philosophical concepts, understanding logic generally, including modal logic, is going to stand you in good stead.

Basically, if you are going to follow only logics from 2000 years ago, you will not be able to engage effectively with more... recent material.

Up to you, of course.

I would claim that water was not H2O before Lavoisier. — Moliere

I'll put my reply here instead of to your PM.

I understand that it was Cavendish, not Lavoisier, who first identified water as a compound (through experiments around 1781), though Lavoisier's chemical revolution helped fix the conceptual framework.

It occurred to me on looking again that there are two readings of what you wrote - the de re and the de dicto. The sentence ‘Water is H₂O’ was not something people could assert or know before Cavendish; the term "water" did not yet rigidly refer to H₂O. So if you were saying that the word "water" could not be used to refer to H₂O before Cavendish announced his work, I agree. However, if the assertion is that prior to Cavensih's announcement, the chemical structure of water was not H₂O, it is I think in error.

There's all sorts of complexities here. The foremost is that Kripke's "Water=H₂O" is intended only for extensional contexts. While Aristotle presumably believed fish live water, he doubtless did not believe that they live in H₂O.

We should head back to the topic at hand, which is "what is real". The idea seems to be that there is an essence, a "what makes a thing what it is", and that this is of use in deciding what is real and what isn't. Along with this goes the view that there really is a difference between what is real and what is not real, such that for any x, the question "is x real" has a firm "yes" or no"no" answer.

I think that view is mistaken, for reasons I gave earlier. And I think that view is quite common amongst philosophers - at least those who are alive.

Now there is a clear and well-formulated use of "essence" that relies on modal logic, and says that an essence of some item is a property had by that item in every possible world. This appears to me, and I suspect to most folk*, as a better definition than either that the essence of a thing is determined by its participation in a Form... or that the essence of a thing is "what it is to be that thing".

Now Kripke really did throw the cat amongst the pigeons. Unit Possible World Semantics, the orthodoxy, form Russell and Quine and friends, was that essences were passé, not amenable to a decent logical analysis and best thrown out. Kripke gave essences A New Hope, redefining them in a rigid and formal way. However in so doing he moved the emphasis away from metaphysics to logic and epistemology.

And also, in doing this, Kripke (and others - "Kripke" here is shorthand for those who adopted and adapted his ideas) detached essence from natural kinds and teleology and other such notions.

So Kripke's revolution dispatched much of the previous work on modality, necessity and essences.

The result is that essences no longer are of much help in setting out what is real and what isn't.

But here are those amongst us who, bathing in the light of Plato and Aristotle, seek to reinvigorate metaphysics by bringing back the "what makes a thing what it is" version of essence. And that's pretty much were the argument here stands.

I'll leave this now, although I might come back to it and talk about water again.

Cheers.

* it's not in the philpapers survey, and perhaps it should be

:wink: Nice.

Is Pyornkrachzark a rock? Well, we have a choice here. We might say that while Pyornkrachzark is made of stone, he is not a rock, but perhaps a silicon-based life form, and no more a rock than you and I are pools of water.

Or alternately we might say that Pyornkrachzark is a rock, and that therefore the assertion "rocks do not sleep" is incorrect.

That is, we might re-asses Tim's assertion that rocks neither sleep nor wake. We have a choice here, not about whether rocks sleep so much as about how we use the word "rock".

I don't think this has an affect on the argument given, which is that accessibility does what Tim tried to do with potential, only more clearly and with less metaphysical baggage.

@J, just noticed this. I don't recognise you in the somewhat patronising description given by .

I was going to PM that, but perhaps it is better said publicly.

1. I hold X to be true
2. Therefore, I am committed to saying that Joe, who holds ~X, is holding to a falsehood

The question is, "What is Joe, according to me?" Certainly he is wrong. Is he ignorant? Possibly, depending on one's definition. Is he acting in bad faith? No, not necessarily. — Leontiskos

There's also the possibility that Joe is right and I am wrong. There might be some point in trying to understand Joe's position, to see how the arguments he uses function, to try to find some common ground.

There's an alternative to thinking that an argument is either right or wrong. Rather than framing disagreements as binary conflicts we might seek the underlying structure of the disagreement, which could lead to deeper agreement or at least mutual intelligibility.

This would involve some good will on the part of the participants, and the acceptance of what we might call "liberal" guidelines for discussion.

This seems to be what this forum is about. But we can check with @Jamal on that.

It might involve not dismissing someone as "beyond the pale"; however given the limited time and resources available to us all, there may be some folk with whom the law of diminishing returns suggests there is not much value in continuing a discussion.

Just a thought. Let's see what response this post elicits.

meh.

I've given you more consideration than your posts deserve.

Too obtuse? Sorry. Tim commenting on a post of mine that indulged in the sort of psychological discrediting we see here between Leon and Fire. It's a way to not address the actual contents of the arguments presented. "Othering" atheists so that they can safely be ignored, and we don't have to give due consideration to what they say - perhaps.

Hmm...

The problem with this sort of "argument from psychoanalysis" is that they are very easy to develop...

Such arguments might be plausible, or even true to varying degrees, but they don't actually address the real issue at hand. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That you are caused to so reason? — J

Phhhh.

Big issues. Let's leave it aside for now.

The problem with this sort of "argument from psychoanalysis" is that they are very easy to develop.[/quote
Of course; I quite agree. Furthermore, even if the account I gave of Klima's motivation is true, it does not impact the validity of the argument in the article.

Their use is in setting out in general terms the territory in which the discussion is taking place. Kinda like claiming that Wittgenstein on Laws is a variation on Hume or Parmenides. Or saying things such as "Moderns come to define freedom in terms of potency", as if "moderns" were a monoculture.

We have found some agreement.
— Count Timothy von Icarus

2. Water was not H2O before 19th century chemistry. — Leontiskos

Perhaps it is worth noting that while before Cavendish announced the composition to the Royal Society in 1784, we didn't know that water was H₂O, water was nevertheless H₂O before his announcement.

Seems to me the core distinction here is between those who would say that a property is essential to an individual iff it is what makes that individual what it is (or something like that...) and those who say that a property is essential to an individual iff it belongs to that individual in every possible world. That, and 1-3 are not obviously mutually exclusive.

I would claim that water was not H2O before Lavoisier. — Moliere

That seem quite mistaken. And on either account of essence.

In Kripke - that is, in the standard accepted modern model of modal logic - the essential properties of some thing are those had by it in every possible world.

The tension here is that this is a different definition to that found in Aristotle, and held by most philosophers up until the seventies.

Aristotle's definition is along the lines of an essence being something like "what it is to be the thing it is and not another thing..." As you can see this is a comparatively vague notion, and no doubt others will be able to finesse it in various ways, but it makes use of notions of hylomorphism and teleology somewhat foreign to science.

The tension is that these two definitions have somewhat different consequences.

So it's not that modal logic rejects essentialism, as some supose. But it treats it in a very different way. There are a couple of other threads right now that are dealing with these issues.

If all we wish to do is save any aspect of modal reasoning so as to avoid absolute collapse, we have to show such a thing as modal reasoning exists in impossible worlds. — Hanover

An unusual phrasing, but I supose modal logic apples to impossible worlds and is what shows them to contain the contradictions that render them impossible.

That is, can I not logically reason based upon the antecedent without the antecedent being true in this world? That seems what modal logic is. — Hanover

Yep.

Now, in the present, certain things have certain potentials. Joe might potentially be asleep at 10 PM or be awake then. A rock, by contrast, cannot be asleep or awake. So, we can speak about possibilities in the future according to the ways in which things in the present possess potentiality. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Better: now, in the present, certain states of affairs might be accessible. One accessible word is that in which Joe might be asleep at 10 PM, another accessible world is that in which he is awake at 10 PM. A rock, by contrast, cannot be asleep or awake. So, in no possible world is there a rock that is asleep or awake, and so no world is accessible in which the rock is awake. We can speak about possibilities in the future according to the ways in which things in the present are accessible. But that is only a small part of what we can do with PWS.

And to be clear, accessibility is a formally defined, semantic notion, and part of the possible worlds modelling of formal modal logics, avoiding any messy ontology of potential and actual.

And far more flexible than the Aristotelian model. It handles a wider range of modalities, cleanly avoids category mistakes, and is rigorous enough for computation.

There is no problem with time. The law of noncontradiction is clearly qualified with "at the same time". — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course. And it is also, after Kripke, clearly qualified with "in the same possible world". To ask what might have happened if Caesar had not crossed the Rubicon is not to ask what might have happened if Caesar had both crossed and not crossed the Rubicon.

That's the point. You allow indexation for time, but not for possible worlds. Why?

As you and I discussed the "possible world" is how we relate to the future. — Metaphysician Undercover

I hope it is clear, and as the Roman example given above exemplifies, possible worlds can be about the past as well as the future. If we accept rigid designation, the possible Caesar who did not cross the Rubicon is the very same as the actual Caesar who did. That that is, "what might have happened if Caesar had not crossed the Rubicon" is a question about Caesar, and not about some other person in some other possible world who happens to have the same name.

...we need to be clear to distinguish between the "ontological possibility" of the future... and the "epistemic possibility" of the past... — Metaphysician Undercover

As previously explained, this is addressed in a Kripke-style answer to the sea battle problem. Will there be a sea battle tomorrow? Two possible worlds are accessible, one in which the sea battle occurs, the other in which it does not. As things stand, today we do not know which is the actual world, tomorrow night we will. But the accessibility response is not limited to temporality, in the way your response is.

In trying to throw out the bath water of fatalism, you have wholly thrown out the babe of modality. And needlessly, since accessibility allows us to make choices.

You really would benefit from reading a bit of the modal logic done in the last hundred years.

That would decimate the fora.

"if I were you... — Hanover

Then, by p(x)⊃☐p(x), I would be you in the actual world, which is false. So I don't see that Meta can get even to this.

isn't your analysis of Meta's argument a contradiction of your argument. — Hanover

Well for Meta, it must be, since it supposes the possibility that he is correct, and it must follow from p(x)⊃☐p(x) that he is necessarily correct...

What other folk do is imaging a possible world in which Meta is correct and work out what the consequences would be in that world. So yes, we look to see what a possible world in which Meta is correct would be like. Meta says we can't do that. I think we've shown that he is mistaken. Even by this very conversation, in which we consider what a world in which he was correct would be like.

Can you see another way to save Meta from modal collapse? Is p(x)⊃☐p(x) too strong a rendering of his account?

Edit: What p(x)⊃☐p(x) says is that if (x) has the property p, then (x) has the property p in every possible world. It supposes only that if a property is essential to an individual, then that individual will have that property in every possible world. He said "every property of an object is essential to that object's identity". Tricky to see another interpretation.

Going back to the Klima article, to my eye Kripke’s modal account of essence, grounded in rigid designation and necessity de re, renders traditional Aristotelian essences unnecessary. It explains essential properties through semantics and logic, not metaphysical natures. For Christian philosophers, especially Thomists, this is a threat: metaphysical essences underpin the real distinction between essence and existence, the intelligibility of creation, and arguments for God's existence. Without real essences, classical theism loses its metaphysical scaffolding. Gyula Klima’s work is a strategic response—aiming to reclaim Aristotelian essence as a metaphysical foundation that grounds, rather than depends on, modal necessity. His goal is not only to preserve essence but to defend a metaphysical worldview in which nature, teleology, and God remain intelligible in light of modern philosophical developments.

It’s a form of special pleading, in that it reintroduces Aristotelian essence as necessary without sufficiently justifying that move in neutral or broadly acceptable terms. To sympathetic readers (especially Christian metaphysicians), it will seem like a vital recovery of lost depth. To others, it looks like a philosophical backdoor for preserving theological-metaphysical commitments that the Kripkean revolution had already made optional.

But that's the sort of thing I would say, isn't it, being a godless heathen.

To keep whittling away... — Richard B

I'm happy to join in. Is ice still water? Good question.

I don't find Stroll convincing. Ordinary people do say things such as "Take care, the water froze to ice overnight". And here they might be puzzled if you suggested that the water and the ice are different things. Freezing is the sort of thing that water does in the cold, after all. It's not utterly improper to say that ice is frozen water, and thereby mean that ice is one type of water amongst others.

We might, of course, simply choose to use "water" to refer only to the liquid, and "ice" to refer only to the solid. We might equally choose or stipulate that "water" is the genus of which "ice" is a species.

And there is the alternate mentioned above - to accept that either view is valid, and the choice discretionary. That there is no fact of the matter, but just two slightly different ways of using the words "water" and "ice".

It's this anti-essentialist last that I take as the better account.

But I am also happy to go along with Kripke and say ice is one of the various states in which we can find water, and that necessarily, all water is H₂O, as might suit the circumstances. This seems to me the better way to think about essentialism, if one must. Perhaps by keeping what's useful in essentialism, and let go of what’s dogmatic.

You're facing the same stonewall I've faced many times previously.

Odd, that it's apparently OK to index a proposition in time: "Joe was asleep at 4 am but awake at 4 PM"; but to refuse to index a proposition in reference to possible worlds: "Joe was asleep in w₀ but awake in w₁"

Anyway, there may be a way of parsing @Metaphysician Undercover's account into modal logic with a possible worlds semantic, so as to clarify the consequences. His core claim is "every single property, action, and attribute of a given object is essential to its being what it is".

□(P(x)) for any property P that x has in the actual world.

This is modal collapse. There are no possible worlds. It imposes metaphysical essentialism on the system. Meta’s view amounts to a denial of genuine modality.

Recapping, for any individual x, and any property p,
p(x)⊃☐p(x)

On this view:

• Nothing could have been otherwise.
• If an object lacks even one actual property, it's a different object.
• So every possible world is identical to the real world resulting in modal collapse (if we interpret PWS in terms of rigid designation)
• So there are no counterparts of an object with slightly different properties. (if we interpret PWS in terms of counterpart theory)
• Therefore: no true modal variation for any object.

So how are we to understand modal sentences? That "the table could have been red instead of blue" is an impossibility, since then it would not have been that table. Even taking it that "the table could have been red instead of blue" amounts to "there might have been some other table that was blue" fails, because that other table would not be this table. Any variation in property means we are talking about a different object.

The upshot is that while in Meta's system we might be able to say "Meta might have read Kripke", this cannot be more than a string of words. We cannot make any deductions therefrom, like "If Meta had read Kripke then we might not be having this conversation". And there is no basis for assigning truth values here. Deliberation becomes meaningless, there's nothing to decide, since we only ever do what we in fact do. Prediction loses grip, since we can't consider various potential futures. Explanation and understanding suffer, since we can't ask why something happened instead of something else — because nothing else could have happened.

So Meta can go ahead on this path, but the results are somewhat catastrophic.

Mostly I think it would be great if we could discuss religious topics without anti-religious evangelization constantly occurring. — Leontiskos

The rules are very specific in this regard.

Evangelists: Those who must convince everyone that their religion, ideology, political persuasion, or philosophical theory is the only one worth having. — Site Guidelines

So if evangelism is occurring, please, report it so that it can be dealt with.

Cheers.

We have a plague of them at present. Glad to see some nuance.

Cheers.

...other essentialists... — Apustimelogist

Is that "other" advised? As in, would you consider yourself an 'essentialist'? If so, may I ask what would that involve - that things have a set of characteristics which make them what they are, and that the task of science and philosophy is their discovery and expression? Or that essence precedes existence?

Deuterium is, of course, an isotope of hydrogen. It follows then that D₂O is a isotopologue of H₂O.

Hence, heavy water is water.

It seems odd to say that science did not discover that water is H₂O. We used the terms "water", "Hydrogen" and "Oxygen" prior to the discovery. There's two ways to think about it. In the first, "water" refers to a particular substance, and science uncovered its deeper essence. On this view, water = H₂O is a necessary truth, discovered empirically. Profound metaphysical stuff. The other way to think about it, the meaning of "water" is based on its place in our dealings with it — that it is clear, potable, etc. On this view, saying water is H₂O is just a shift in how we describe it.

Different ways of talking about the same stuff. Are we obligated to say one is right, the other wrong? I don't see why.

Another interesting aside.

What we discussed in that thread isn't Aristotle's answer to the question Wittgenstein took up, just an ancillary point that the positive skeptic's position is self-undermining. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Which, of course, was Wittgenstein's response. So I remain puzzled as to what it is you are actually proposing. However, it's a big topic and as you say, peripheral to this thread, so we might leave it there.

unless you have more to add?