Final Answer to the Age-Old Question: Is Water Wet?

You might have had a friend ask you this question before. Maybe your job interviewer. Maybe your significant other’s father. What an odd question! Of course, water is not wet! It makes other things wet! Or, vice versa, water is wet, it’s part of the definition!

Wow, could it really be? water on water? IS IT WET?

Here’s the danger: you’re not thinking it through all the way. Both trains of thought have problems.

Taking the first horn of the dilemma, we’ll say water makes things wet. What do we mean by wet? We do not mean whet, which is to stimulate a desire, a wish. We mean that it soaks something. Sometimes, the water stays on the outside, like on a human being; other times, water permeates the object, like a pool towel. So, wet means to have water added to the object. Of course, we say that the elementary unit of water is H₂O, so we can say adding water molecules to something makes it wet.

However, that means that adding water molecules to a water molecule makes it wet. What nonsense is this!? Water really is wet!

Or so you think.

What do we define as water? Well, its molecule is H₂O. It has characteristics like high surface tension, and strong polarity. We don’t want to define water as strongly polar, because it’s merely a description. If it has a high surface tension, it doesn’t mean the substance is water. However, one molecule of H₂O doesn’t have high surface tension, so it doesn’t behave like water. Water, then, is a combination of water molecules that can form a surface. I will say 3 or more, because I believe a triangular shape of water molecules would act like water.

We can say adding water molecules to something makes it wet.

So, a water molecule is not water. Water molecules added together are wet. H₂O molecules added together make water. Therefore, water is always wet! The dilemma is resolved!

Yet, that side of the dilemma still has a problem. That problem is the unity of opposites.

That’s a weird phrase to say. How can opposites be united? Well, if you know the concept of Yin and Yang, then you have that sort of idea. Basically, there is a certain balance between opposites that exists, there is always a bad to the good. A lot of people will say that evil is the lack of good, and that comes from the idea that certain characteristics, like goodness, or beauty, or size, are spectra. They have two ends to them, and within the world there is almost never a case of absolute to one side or the other. A very attractive person may have an awful personality, balancing some of their beauty with their ugly. Fire is beautiful when dancing on a bonfire; a fire is disturbing when dancing on your effigy.

The point is that, there always must be an opposite to describe someone as good. If you only saw attractive people for your entire life, you would not consider them attractive. You may not even call them normal looking because you would probably think of it as a non-issue. The term does not apply when its opposite does not exist.

This sort of idea exists as far back as the 5th century A.D. in the west, when Augustine formulated his belief that evil is the deficiency of good. He used this claim to justify the existence of God, as a response to the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil is the exploration of how there can be evil in the world, if there was an omnibenevolent, or all-good, creator. Augustine used it to say that there must be evil within the world for there to be good, and even though it’s counter-intuitive, since God is all-good, he must also make some evil in the world. Otherwise, we wouldn't experience it as good, and we would not have the concept of it.

Water is always wet.

There is never a time when it is not wet. However, things like towels, or bodies, or knives, or windows can all be dry or wet. Looking at it from the perspective of balance, it seems to be utter nonsense that water can be wet, but not dry. It seems to defy the definition of wetness, because wetness is not a permanent condition, only temporary. Therefore, we would say that water is not wet; or, at the very least, the term wet should not apply to water, as it adds no meaning.

Yet, there’s also more intuition in this claim than that. Think of a slip-and-slide. The slip-and-slide is slippery. Is water slippery on its own? Well, that doesn’t apply to water either. Also, when you think of the towels, windows, bodies, slip-and-slides, knives, floors, they’re all solids. The term wet is a property of a solid, right? There’s nothing in the definition that says so, but if you called gasoline wet, your father-in-law would glare at you, exasperated. “Why’d my daughter marry this buffoon and not Clive? Clive was amazing. Hmmmm. Clive.” That’s when a man named Clive comes in, breaking up the ceremony where you’re renewing your vows. Don’t call gasoline wet.

The term does not apply when its opposite does not exist.

In other words, perfectly abstracting the concept of wetness and the concept of water will show that water is indeed wet. Concretely, or contextually, water does not have the property of wetness, since it doesn’t fit the description of what wet is. Adding water to water is NOT making it wet; it’s making water more watery.

Ok, so water is not REALLY wet. But is a sink a urinal?

I'm gonna need some help with this.

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