Online research in philosophy

In some Indian cities, unaccounted for water (UFW) is more than half of the water produced. Benchmarking must credit utilities for reduction in UFW and improvements in service delivery. Using data from 20 Indian urban water utilities, the study evaluates utility performance considering that reduction in UFW is costly. It applies directional output distance function as an analytical tool for measuring technical inefficiencies of the utilities. The results exhibit that at the mean level, the Indian water utilities have potential of increasing water delivery level and reducing UFW by 20 percent. About half of that can be realized by changing the scale of operation. The results concerning returns to scale support the idea that water should be priced at marginal cost of supply. The regression results reveal that percentage of metered connections and length of distribution network are major determinant of performance of water utilities.

(1) Is content in the head? I believe that water is wet. My twin on Twin Earth, which is just like Earth except that H2O is replaced by the superficially identical XYZ, does not. His thoughts concern not water but twin water: I believe that water is wet, but he believes that twin water is wet. It follows that that what a subject believes is not wholly determined by the internal state of the believer. Nevertheless, the cognitive similarities between me and my twin are striking. Is there some wholly internal aspect of content that we might share?

This book examines some possible ethical principles to resolve moral dilemmas involving water. Existing problems in current water management practices are discussed in light of these principles. Transformation of human water ethics has the potential to be far more effective, cheaper and acceptable than some existing means of “regulation”, but transformation of personal and societal ethics need time because the changes to ethical values are slow.

WATER. …I. The liquid of which seas, lakes, and rivers are composed, and which falls as rain and issues from springs. When pure, it is transparent, colourless (except as seen in large quantity, when it has a blue tint), tasteless, and inodorous. --Oxford English Dictionary …the fact that an English speaker in 1750 might have called XYZ ‘water,’ whereas he or his successors would not have called XYZ water in 1800 or 1850 does not mean that the ‘meaning’ of ‘water’ changed for the average speaker in the interval.

: Basia Irland is an artist whose work revolves around water. Her vision is wide and she addresses ecological, social, and policy issues. Many of her works consist of portable sculptures which house maps, videos, natural objects, water samples, hydrologic reports, and research. In this paper I focus on two of her pieces, Desert Fountain and the Gathering of Waters project. I find these two pieces especially illuminating, because Irland reveals the nature of water, and also illustrates what our relationship to water should be. The ethical dimension of these pieces illustrates such values as harmony and reciprocity. Her work is a powerful statement about how we, individually and collectively, should interact with the natural world. I will explore each of these pieces in turn, allowing her work to make the connections between what is and what ought to be.

The title of David Armstrong’s book on the topic asks “What is a Law of Nature?” [1] The answer I will develop and motivate in this paper is that causal laws are analyses of dispositions. We describe dispositions in terms of subjunctive conditionals. For sugar to be soluble in water, for instance, is just for it to be such that if it were submerged in water (under appropriate conditions), it would dissolve. In general, we can say that for a thing to have a disposition is for it to be such that were certain precipitating conditions to obtain, then a certain manifestation of the disposition would occur. [2] In the case of solubility, being submerged in water (under appropriate conditions) is the precipitating condition for the manifestation of going into solution. A careful account of the conditions under which sugar would go into solution in water, that is, an account of the specific nature of its solubility, would be a statement of law. That statement of law would tell us something about the nature of sugar in terms of the dispositions it grounds.

In this paper I aim to show that a certain law of nature, namely that common salt (sodium chloride) dissolves in water, is metaphysically necessary. The importance of this result is that it conflicts with a widely shared intuition that the laws of nature (most if not all) are contingent. There have been debates over whether some laws, such as Newton’s second law, might be definitional of their key terms and hence necessary. But the law that salt dissolves in water is not that kind of law. The law statement ‘salt dissolves in water’ is clearly synthetic. It appears a classic case of a contingent law. We like to believe that there are possible worlds in which the laws of nature are different and in which salt does not dissolve in water.