On a tangent to the ‘quality of water’ thread, I’d like to ask if we are defining things correctly…
If you draw a line and then ask, what is this line made of, you will find out what it is made of but wont have defined what the line is. Effectively defining what a thing is by its composition is perhaps a fallacy. We can for example take all the same components of a thing e.g. all the cells in our body, and rearrange them to make something different. Equally we could make a copy of them and make a second you or generally a second [ad infinitum] version of a given thing, but that is not the same as the thing we began with.
The line is A, what it is composed of is B. one does not define the other, metaphorically the holistic entity [you, water, colour, chair, fire, etc] is akin to a wall or walls, where what that is made of is akin to the room those walls are part of. When we define a thing by the contents of a thing, we are moving right past the thing and onto another thing!
the contents [inside the room] are not the same as what contains them. a container and the contained are not the same.
The fact that we speak of A means that we already know what A is. However, when we ask “what is A?” we are not asking what is A in the literal sense of the word. We are asking what is associated with A. Usually, this means what is analogous to A. Also, we’re usually asking for a specific analogue, not any kind of analogue. In other words, we are asking which element of some presumed set of elements is most similar to A.