On Water Being Wet

An Exercise in Logical Clarity and Argumentation

“Water is not wet!” or so I have been told by numerous students over the last ten years of my teaching career. Hopefully that statement strikes you as patently absurd. Yet, I kid you not, I have had manifold students bring this up to me, independently, years and states apart, and want to argue about it. This is what happens when you are the logic teacher I guess. I can only assume that such an idea spreads through ether (or more likely the internet) and that is why it keeps coming round again and again like a bad merry-go-round. It’s just too irresistible for the young mind (typically the male young mind I’ve noticed) to not latch onto something like this. Why? Because it challenges common assumptions! What teenager doesn’t like to challenge the status quo?

The claim sounds plausible to them, they buy it, and they have been victimizing the world with this sophistry ever since (with abandoned glee I might add). Their excitement is quite understandable for if a person can convince other people that water is not wet then he can surely conquer the world! At least I imagine that is the elation they are feeling when they convert more people to their heresy.

In all seriousness, topics like this can be used as great practice for logical thinking and argumentation. Having students define their terms and defend assertions is critically important to their education. Students need to learn to make critical distinctions, how to inquire into the nature of a thing, and how to define terms in accordance with reality.

In her essay, The Lost Tools of Learning, Dorothy Sayers discusses the value of such logical argumentation exercises.

​​A glib speaker in the Brains Trust once entertained his audience (and reduced the late Charles Williams to helpless rage) by asserting that in the Middle Ages it was a matter of faith to know how many archangels could dance on the point of a needle. I need not say, I hope, that it never was a "matter of faith"; it was simply a debating exercise, whose set subject was the nature of angelic substance: were angels material, and if so, did they occupy space? The answer usually adjudged correct is, I believe, that angels are pure intelligences; not material, but limited, so that they may have location in space but not extension. An analogy might be drawn from human thought, which is similarly non-material and similarly limited. Thus, if your thought is concentrated upon one thing say, the point of a needle it is located there in the sense that it is not elsewhere; but although it is "there," it occupies no space there, and there is nothing to prevent an infinite number of different people's thoughts being concentrated upon the same needle-point at the same time. The proper subject of the argument is thus seen to be the distinction between location and extension in space; the matter on which the argument is exercised happens to be the nature of angels (although, as we have seen, it might equally well have been something else); the practical lesson to be drawn from the argument is not to use words like "there" in a loose and unscientific way, without specifying whether you mean "located there" or "occupying space there." Scorn in plenty has been poured out upon the mediaeval passion for hair-splitting: but when we look at the shameless abuse made, in print and on the platform, of controversial expressions with shifting and ambiguous connotations, we may feel it in our hearts to wish that every reader and hearer had been so defensively armoured by his education as to be able to cry: Distinguo.

It seems to me that the claim “water is not wet” (or stated as a question, “is water wet?”) is just a modern version of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Much will depend on the definitions of the terms being used and what those involved in the dialogue are willing to concede to one another. Much should depend, also, on reality itself because unlike God we do not create reality by our speech (or at least not in the same way or to the same extent God does). Our job in exercises like these is to attempt to adequately and truly describe the things which God has made.

My students have been quick to point out to me that “the dictionary” agrees with them that “water is not wet.” Rather, “water makes other things wet.” Appealing to the dictionary should be its own kind of fallacy. You know…that one monolithic and immutable dictionary that subjugates the will of all mankind to the reality of its own making. But I, for one, am not willing to concede so easily to any definition which so preposterously concludes that water is not wet. Citing a dictionary is not the end of the matter. I would point out that fallible men write dictionaries (at least we do until our A.I. overlords take this away from us) and entries can change over time. As entries change they either get closer or further from an accurate description of a given term. In recent years there has been quite a push to change lexical definitions for terms like man, woman, person, marriage, etc., and this has been entirely a move away from the truth. We can always argue for a better (or worse) understanding of a given term.

Alright then, so let’s address the claim itself. According to one article representing the position that “water is not wet”:

“Wetness is a property that arises from the interaction between a liquid and a solid surface. In other words, when water touches a surface, we say that the surface is wet.”

In support of this assertion (for it is actually not an argument but a bald assertion) the article cites, you guessed it, a dictionary.¹ Here are the definitions offered by the New Oxford American Dictionary:

It turns out the definition of “wet” as an adjective and as a verb (at least in this dictionary) agrees with their claim. At least it agrees with their claim that “wet” refers to a surface being covered or saturated with water. The definition of “wet” actually does nothing to aid the idea that water is not wet, rather, it only furthers the idea that water can make other things wet; which no one was objecting to (although I am about to do just for fun). Do try not to read the entry about “wet” as a noun though, for that would be damaging indeed to the argument that water is not wet.

In support of this abominable claim the article gives the following examples:

Perhaps at some point in the past you have heard a scream but you were never sure of its source? Possibly, just possibly, that might have been emitted by poor Aristotle, shrieking from his grave, as someone wrote the above examples. The sophistry is so strong with these statements that I barely know where to begin. I am overwhelmed, not by the reasoning, but by the copiousness of the buffoonery.

Responding to the first few examples should be enough to highlight some major problems.

1. For the first example, rather than saying “wetness is like heat” it would be a far better analogy to say that “water is to wet as fire is to hot.” To say “wetness is like heat” is patently false. Wetness and heat are, in fact, very different from one another (to the extent that they approach being opposites). But we might very well say, by way of the analogy I just gave, that wetness and heat share a similar kind of relation to an original source. That is to say that these terms denote the transfer of a certain property from a source to a receptacle. This does not, however, suggest that water is not wet any more than it suggests fire is not hot.

2. The second example simply describes the destructive result of applying fire to a combustible object. The fact that no one says “fire is burnt” is irrelevant. Both Fire and Water can destroy. No one says “fire is destroy” or “water is destroy” but that they both can destroy. Is this just a grammar issue? How does this suggest that fire isn’t hot or that water is not wet?

3. The third example may be the most confusing yet. A blue ball. No one says blueness is a ball. Agreed. But who would say the color Blue lacks blueness? It seems self-evident that if anything has blueness necessarily it is the color blue itself. That blueness is seen in a ball, a shirt, the sky, etc., are all examples of accidents (in the Aristotelian sense meaning that the color is not essential to the nature of the thing). Some balls are red, others yellow, because color is not part of the essence of what it means to be a ball. Again, water is to wet as blue is to blueness, stop confusing the issue.

I think this is sufficient for demonstrating the fact that the above examples from the article are simply confusing and unhelpful. There are numerous category errors and equivocations in the examples given and they do not really do anything to prove the original assertion that “water is not wet.”

Now let’s turn the tide and make some positive arguments in favor of the counterclaim, namely, that “water is wet.” How might this be done? Below I offer two arguments in an attempt to prove that the claim “water is wet” is necessarily (dare I say irrefutably?) true. The third argument seeks to undermine the original claim even further, arguing that not only is water wet (wetness being a part of its essential nature) but that technically water is also incapable of making other things wet (that’s right, go big or go home)! Here we go:

Argument #1

1. It is impossible to impart a property from one substance to another if that property does not first reside in the original substance (i.e. one cannot give what one does not have).

2. It is said that water is able to impart the property of wetness to other substances.

3. Therefore, if water can impart wetness, then wetness is a property of water.

Argument #2

1. Wet and Dry are mutually exclusive concepts. 

2. Like light and darkness, on and off, true and false, it may be said that there is no middle between wet and dry.

3. Any particular substance, then, is either wet or dry, but not both.

4. It is impossible for a dry substance to impart wetness to another dry substance.

5. If water is not wet then it is dry.

6. It follows then that water is not able to make anything wet.

7. The previous conclusion seems absurd.

8. So, water must be wet.

Argument #3

1. Substances which are not wet are dry. 

2. Dry substances can only be called wet by means of accommodative language or by metamorphosis.

3. A shirt is an example of a dry substance.

4. To say “this shirt is wet” is not technically accurate though it is a permissible use of language because we make many such accommodations in our speech (For example, we say “the sun is rising” when in actuality the world is turning).

5. Water is said to make a shirt wet when it is applied to a shirt.

6. The shirt technically is not wet, rather, the water which is wet is merely cohabitating with the shirt for a time.

7. The wetness that one feels when they say, “this shirt is wet” is entirely the wetness of the water itself which is presently cohabitating with the shirt.

8. To say “this shirt is wet” in a literal fashion would imply that the shirt’s substance has undergone a metamorphosis as when a caterpillar turns into a butterfly.

9. In the case of a “wet shirt” there is no substantial change in the shirt, rather, we are simply saying that for a time water, which is wet, is cohabitating with the materials of the shirt.

10. Dry substances cannot technically become wet unless they undergo a metamorphosis, ceasing to be what they were.

11. Water cannot affect such a metamorphosis.

12. Therefore water cannot make anything else wet.

So there it is. I’ve made my case. Water is wet and it cannot make other things wet. Feel free to try to prove me wrong, that’s part of the fun!

1. Technically the article casually mentions two different dictionaries and doesn’t specify which one the stated definition comes from.