Philosophy

What, precisely, is requested when the question "What is X" is asked?

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It depends, doesn't it? If the question is "What is that funny-looking gizmo?" it's likely that the person simply doesn't recognize the sort of thing s/he's seeing. The answer might be "It's a pressure cooker weight" or "it's a memory chip."

Sometimes "What is X?" is a way of asking for an explanation of the meaning or reference of a word, as in "What is a basilisk?" (Answer, as any Harry Potter reader knows: it's a giant lizardly sort of beast that can kill you simply by staring into your eyes.)

Perhaps what you have in mind is a question about the "essential properties" of something -- about the nature of some kind of thing or stuff. A sample question might be "What is water?" and the candidate answer might be "Water is H2O." The idea would be that this is the nature of water -- the kind of stuff it is. If this really is the nature or water, then nothing could count as water unless it was H2O, and for reasons that aren't simply linguistic. However, philosophers won't all agree about whether there are such natures on the first place.

So what's clear is that there isn't any one precise answer to the question of what's being asked when the question at hand is "What is X?" And the more philosophical the questioner's intent, the less likely that there will be agreement about the best answer.

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