But it is proven this is a false claim, and there is no such fact [water is H2O] independent of the human conditions.
Here is what PH is claiming;
Consider the proposition that water is H2O.
The fact that water is essentially a compound of hydrogen and oxygen was discovered in the eighteenth century, and its molecular formula was worked out in the nineteenth.
But these are not the facts on the basis of which the distinction between water and other substances initially depended, and water would still be H2O even if these facts had never been discovered.
So the proposition that water is H2O is not analytic: it is not simply true in virtue of the conventions of language.
It is, in fact, true independently of these conventions, since its truth is independent of whether anyone has the language to express it.
Moreover, if it is true, then it is necessarily true, for the molecular structure of water is essential to its nature.
The substance in the glass in front of me would not be water if it were not H2O, however like water it may be in appearance, savour, function, and so on.
pg. 16 The Philosophy of Nature - Brian Ellis
Here is paper that counter Ellis claims;
What we ordinary identify as 'water' is not solely H2O but contain other essential elements and depending on many other variables.Ellis argues that certain essential properties of objects in the world not only determine the nature of these objects but also how they will behave in any situation.
In this paper I will critique Ellis's essentialism from the perspective of the philosophy of chemistry, arguing that our current knowledge of chemistry in fact does not lend itself to essentialist interpretations and that this seriously undercuts Ellis's project.
In particular I will criticize two key distinctions Ellis draws between internal vs. external properties and essential vs. accidental properties, showing that at the chemical level such distinctions are insupportable.
If essential properties only exist at the level of sub-atomic physics, then Ellis's hopes that essentialism will provide a theoretical basis for a philosophy of chemistry are at best hopes for a very distant future, since the argument that chemical structure and dynamics can be explained at the quantum level derived is purely from analogy to much simpler systems than those chemists actually study.
This suggests that we have very little scientific evidence that scientific essentialism is a viable ontology.
Why Water Is Not H2O
So, that 'water is H2O' is contextual, i.e. conditioned upon specific Framework and System of knowledge sustained by human subjects.
Note the reference to International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry which imply 'consensus' within a collective of subjects, i.e. FSK;In this essay I have discussed an assumption of semantic externalist
theories which I called the coordination principle. This is the idea that
natural language kinds and scientific kinds line up or can be mapped
onto one another one-to-one.
A closer look at water shows that there is not this type of simple one-to-one match between chemical and ordinary language kinds.
In fact, the use of kind terms in chemistry is often context sensitive and in cases where chemists want to ensure no ambiguity, they use a very complex and nuanced set of kind terms, none of which could be reasonably associated with the ordinary language kind term “water” alone.
Since we cannot just turn to chemistry to find a single chemical kind that can be used to determine the extension of “water,” there isn’t any strict sense in which water is H2O, because exactly what water is depends on the context in which “water” is uttered.
http://www.phil.upenn.edu/~weisberg/pap ... rfinal.pdf
What is fact must be conditioned upon a specific FSK.Chemists deal with the multiplicity of chemical kinds in two different ways. Most often, they deal with it by using context-sensitive kind terms.
These terms pick out different chemical kinds in different explanatory and conversational contexts. “Water,” as uttered by a chemist, will sometime refer to the isomers of H2O in their natural abundances, sometimes to any isomer of H2O, and sometimes, perhaps, to a homogenous sample of H2 16O depending on the circumstances of the utterance.
When forced to be explicit, chemists use a set of very specific kind terms corresponding to very specific chemical kinds. The results of chemists being forced to be explicit can be found in the extremely precise and often very complex nomenclature established by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.
In this nomenclature, even the different phases of water, a concept which I haven’t discussed, are given their own designations like water (I), water (VI), etc.
The vast majority of chemists and the chemical literature, however, refers to substances in a more straightforward manner—using terms like “water,” or “ethanol,” or “tetrahydrafuran,” which are clear in context.
pg8. http://www.phil.upenn.edu/~weisberg/pap ... rfinal.pdf
For example, to be realistic, the following qualification to FSK is necessary,
"water [conventional, linguistic FSK] is H2O [science-chemistry-FSK]."
So, what PH's claims as fact, e.g. 'water is H20' is a pseudo-fact.
As I had stated, PH's fact is a noumenal illusion, nothing, empty, meaningless and nonsensical.