"If a tree falls..."

[Jonathan Lighter]

The date is probably of no interest, but in case it is :  I first heard the conundrum (and it was presented as such) posed by my ninth-grade science teacher, Mr. Rathman, in late 1962 or (most likely) early '63.

Mr. Rathman's visage strongly resembled that of Joe Kubert's Sgt. Rock as drawn for DC Comics. He would interrupt class each day for a minute or two as a twelfth-grade lab assistant delivered a quart container of buttermilk, which he instantly chugalugged.  Why ? Nobody asked.

Another of his sayings which has stuck in my mind is, "Half of everything we think we know is wrong.  BUT WHICH HALF ?"

JL





Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Fred Shapiro
Subject: Re: "If a tree falls..."
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On Wed, 11 May 2005, Duane Campbell wrote:

> > Can anyone help me determine the origin of the philosophical conundrum "If
> > a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?"
> >
> > Fred Shapiro
>
> I am frankly surprised to see such a question from an esteemed language
> professional. It is not a philosophical conundrum at all. It is a semantic
> question intended to play on the man in the street's ignorance of how
> language works. There are two answers, and both are simple. If by "sound"
> you mean the waves set off by the tree falling, the answer is "yes." If you
> mean "sound" as the interpretation of those waves by the appropriate part of
> the brain, the answer is "no."

This is probably not worth responding to, but let me set out the following
explanation:

If there were no "external" world to serve as cause of our sensations,
where would our sensations and our ideas about the world come from? It
is God who must provide them, Berkeley argues. "To be is to be
perceived," he insists, but everything that exists must therefore be
perceived, all the time, by God. (It was regarding Berkeley's philosophy
that some wit formulated the old gambit, "If a tree falls in the
forest...")
Kathleen M. Higgins and Robert C. Solomon, A Short History of
Philosophy (1996)

Finally, let me note that I am pleased if I am "esteemed," but I am
certainly not a "language professional."

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
Access and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press,
Yale Law School forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu http://quotationdictionary.com
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