I understand that the question is, if no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound?
In: Other
The issue of what sound *is* is one part of this question. This is a pretty easy question for us to answer now, though that wasn’t necessarily true in the past.
But that’s probably the less interesting part of the question, at least for a philosopher, unless they’re really interested in how we use language (which, to be fair, lots are).
We can say “sound” is a pressure wave, but how do we *know* a tree creates this if we can’t hear it? Does it *really* make a sound?
This is a question of epistemology and of metaphysics.
In fact, the person credited with inspiring the question, Bishop Berkeley believed things *didn’t* exist unless they were perceived by someone. That’s a bit like a video game only rendering objects the player can see, except in this case it’s God doing it *(edit: God, not got)*.
It’s a question about the power of induction: the way we expect things to behave the same way we’ve seen them behave before (or heard them: we’ve heard a tree falling making noise when we’re there, so we expect a tree to make noise next time we’re around when it falls, and we expect one to make noise if it falls even if we’re not around).
It’s a question that rose again with the discovery of quantum physics, which raised the prospect that certain properties of things genuinely do depend on whether they’re observed (or rather, interact with other things in the right way).
Latest Answers