“Water” and “H2O” don’t mean the same thing in ordinary English: it is not a priori that water is H2O. But I suspect that when a chemist uses the word “water” in the right kind of professional context, they use it synonymously with “H2O”. Suppose this is right. But what if the chemist uses the word with fellow chemists in an “ordinary” way, telling a colleague that the tea water has boiled?
Here is a possibility: we then have a case of merely hyperintensional vagueness. In cases of merely hyperintensional vagueness, there is vagueness as to what an utterance means, but this vagueness has no effect on truth value.
I suspect that hyperintensional vagueness is a common phenomenon. Likely some people use “triangle” to mean a polygon with three angles (as the etymology indicates) and some use it to mean a polygon with three sides. (We can capture the difference by noting that to the latter group it is trivial that triangles have three sides while for the former it is a not entirely trivial theorem.) But consider a child who inherits the word “triangle” from two parents, one of whom uses it in the angle way and the other uses it in a side way. This is surely not an unusual phenomenon: much of the semantics of our language is inherited from users around us, and these users often have hyperintensional (or worse!) differences in meaning.
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