Language

When is somebody a "competent speaker" with a certain word? For instance, what do I have to know or do to be "competent" with the word "water"? I suppose I don't have to know that it is H2O.

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Well, there's no short or agreed answer to this question. Not even some kind of a vague consensus. On one end, you have people who think that having once upon a time heard the word "water", and as a result having added it to your vocabulary, is sufficient for competence. On the other end, there are people who think that there is a sense of "complete" or "independent" competence, which is supposed to be the basic sense, on which you have to be able to individuate (distinguish, more or less) water from all other things in order to be competent. This doesn't mean that you in practice have to be able to do this but rather that you know distinguishing characteristics of water. There's another view, too, probably mine, according to which there's no such thing as a "competent speaker". This phrase seems to suggest that there is some norm of competence that some of us meet and some of us do not, and I don't myself know where this norm is supposed to come from. Of course, if one wants to stipulatively introduce some meaning for the phrase, then we can talk about whether that's an interesting notion. But asking whether people understand the word "water", as if it's supposed to be clear what this involves, is hopeless.

For my own part, I'd take the more fundamental question anyway to be what it is to have the (a?) concept water. Obviously, a lot of clarification is needed about what a "concept" is supposed to be, and to some extent, the same range options is available here: more stringent, and more relaxed.

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