Without disputing your main point about how philosophers typically behave, I want to clarify the is-water-H2O argument. As I understand it, it's making a point about how we use language: people have been using the word "water" to refer to various puddles, lakes, oceans, beverages, etc for a long time before electrolysis was discovered. We know now that all those instances have being-H2O in common, but it's not a necessary property for the word "water" to apply: if some other chemical fulfilled the everyday requirements for water (being clear, wet, thirst-quenching, etc) without being H2O, it would be "water," and if a particular variation of H2O doesn't fulfill those requirements (^2H2O, heavy water, is poisonous) then it's not water. See "Water is Not H2O" (Michael Weisberg, 2003). http://www.phil.upenn.edu/~weisberg/papers/waterfinal.pdf