If a tree falls in the forest, and two people are around to hear it, does it make a sound?
I feel like typically you’d say yes, it makes a sound. Not two sounds, one for each person, but one sound that both people hear.
But that must mean that a sound is not just auditory experiences, because then there would be two rather than one. Rather it’s more like, emissions of acoustic vibrations. But this implies that it also makes a sound when no one is around to hear it.
I think this just repeats the original ambiguity of the question, by using the word “sound” in a context where the common meaning (air vibrations perceived by an agent) is only partly applicable. It’s still a question of definition, not of understanding what actually happens.
But the way to resolve definitional questions is to come up with definitions that make it easier to find general rules about what happens. This illustrates one way one can do that, by picking edge-cases so they scale nicely with rules that occur in normal cases. (Another example would be 1 as not a prime number.)
My recommended way to resolve (aka disambiguate) definitional questions is “use more words”. Common understandings can be short, but unusual contexts require more signals to communicate.
I think we’re playing too much with the meaning of “sound” here. The tree causes some vibrations in the air, which leads to two auditory experiences since there are two people
If a tree falls in the forest, and two people are around to hear it, does it make a sound?
I feel like typically you’d say yes, it makes a sound. Not two sounds, one for each person, but one sound that both people hear.
But that must mean that a sound is not just auditory experiences, because then there would be two rather than one. Rather it’s more like, emissions of acoustic vibrations. But this implies that it also makes a sound when no one is around to hear it.
I think this just repeats the original ambiguity of the question, by using the word “sound” in a context where the common meaning (air vibrations perceived by an agent) is only partly applicable. It’s still a question of definition, not of understanding what actually happens.
But the way to resolve definitional questions is to come up with definitions that make it easier to find general rules about what happens. This illustrates one way one can do that, by picking edge-cases so they scale nicely with rules that occur in normal cases. (Another example would be 1 as not a prime number.)
My recommended way to resolve (aka disambiguate) definitional questions is “use more words”. Common understandings can be short, but unusual contexts require more signals to communicate.
I think we’re playing too much with the meaning of “sound” here. The tree causes some vibrations in the air, which leads to two auditory experiences since there are two people