Though there is no way to track such things, one very widely asked philosophical question that rings throughout high school and college classrooms as well as bars and dinner time conversation is “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The question in itself is not complicated but its answer says much about the worldview of the respondent. Of course, no one argues that a person’s presence affects a falling tree—it emits the same sound waves whether or not there is someone to detect it. But it is a philosophical question because it goes to the heart of the nature of sound and perception. Specifically it is an epistemological question. This essay explores that nature of this question, explains why it is an epistemological argument and goes on to postulate how John Locke, one of the most influential philosophers in the field of epistemology, among other branches of philosophy and law, would answer it.
Epistemology comes from a Greek word that means knowledge. It concerns itself with questions such as “what can we know” and attempts to get to the heat of what knowledge is, how one acquires it, and what a person can know.
The questions of epistemology are important because they directly about our beliefs and separates what is speculation and what can we truly know and to what extent those things can be known with the goal of getting past what is simply a person’s opinion to what a person could know with certainty.
There are two ways to look at the question of the tree, both involving an epistemological lens. In the first sense, since all of the sounds of falling trees had a human witness to confirm they make a sound, how can one be sure that when there is no one around to witness the fall that the trees do not make a sound? In short, what logical jump is being made to justify that inference of truth grounded in something other than the senses, which tell us of our surroundings.
The second is the nature of sound. This stabs at a much deeper question regarding the nature of the universe. Though there is some debate on the subject, for simplicity’s sake we can say that humans are the only known species of life that has consciousness. If there were no one to perceive the universe, would the universe still exist?
The first question is the more epistemological way to take the question. Epistemology looks at a lot of things that everyday people take for granted. The epistemologist takes every assumed fact and piece of knowledge a person has and asks, “But how do you really know that?”
John Locke was a British empiricist who contributed greatly to the field of epistemology. He was born in 1632 and active during an exciting time in philosophy, during the enlightenment in English (Biography.com, 2013).
Locke’s answer to the tree in a forest question comes from his belief in empiricism that all knowledge comes from the senses and human experience of the world around them. In personal identity this led him to believe that what remains the same over time within a person despite the outward and physical and mental changes that occur without and without.
Locke believed in three substances. Material substance, finite intelligence and God. Lock does not believe the physical nature of man to be his identity, but rather the mental state or consciousness of the entity was the overriding and defining factor.
During his time empiricists were against rationalists like Descartes who believed that the source of human knowledge was reason. As an empiricist, Locke believed in experience as the ultimate source of knowledge. Therefore, while someone like Descartes would believe that the place too look for knowledge lay within the mind, Locke would find observation to be the tool to deduce whether or not a tree makes a sounds when it falls and there is no one to hear it.
The key to how he would answer the question lay in his influence work, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” where he puts forth different type of ideas. One type of idea he calls a “simple idea.” The answer to the question of the tree would be a simple idea. He says “there are some which come into our minds by one sense only there are others that convey themselves into the mind by more senses than one. (Locke, 103).
The tree falling would be of the former categorization, since sound only comes to the senses through the sense of hearing. The third sort of simple idea, one that the rationalists agreed with. These are the “others that are had from reflection only.”
The last sort of idea combines the first two with the third, and these are the “Some that make themselves way, and are suggested to the mind by all the ways of sensation and reflection. (Locke, 104).
Locke’s ultimate goal behind his ideas of ideas was to break away from innate ideas that had gained popularity of the time. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1). Philosophy writer Hans Aarsleff, wrote that Locke is “one of the most influential philosophers[s] of modern times” (Aarsleff, 252). He writes that the fear behind his ideas, and the charge his critics leveled against him was that his arguments would lead to skepticism, although Locke was far from being a skeptic, but someone who believed we must trust the senses in order to be able to having material for the rationality to work with.
Locke believed that everyone entered the world as a tabula rasa, or a blank slate void of categories already preprogrammed into the mind. “We receive this idea from touch,” (Locke, 105) Locke writes about his idea of solidity. Likewise, he would say that we have knowledge of a falling tree through hearing it. Speaking of innate ideas and their connection to the senses Locke writs, “But, since no proposition can be innate unless the ideas about which it is be innate, this will be to suppose all our ideas of colours, sounds, tastes, figure, are innate, than which there cannot be anything more opposite to reason and experience.” (Locke, 38).
The color red, the sound of a falling tree, or slamming door, the smell of baked goods, all of these things, Locke argues, come to be known through the senses. Locke saw a tabula rasa as the only way to have it since he saw anything but that as a slippery slope in which all general true statements could be said to be innate axioms of the mind that people are born with. Thinks like “red is not blue” or “two and two is equal to four” he did not see as things that were written on the mind, but things without much value that it was an error to assume existed before a person had the luxury of being informed by his senses. He writes “I answer, that makes nothing to the argument of universal assent upon hearing and understanding. For, if that be the certain mark of innate, whatever proposition can be found that receives general assent as son as heard and understood, that must be admitted for an innate proposition, as well as this maxim, ‘that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be,’ they being upon this ground equal” (Locke, 39).
In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke makes an important distinction between hearing and understanding. “The argument of assenting on first hearing, is upon a false supposition of no precedent teaching.” Basically, the first time someone hears a tree fall in a forest and make a sound, leaves the person with no knowledge that such a thing is logical in assuming that it will happen again. Perhaps the next time a tree falls there will be no sound an a Smurf will come out of the stump and do a dance, there is just, Locke would argue, no way to know how it will happen against.
He goes on in this vein to say, “There is, I fear, this fosters weakness in the forgoing argument, which would persuade us that therefore this maxims are to be thought innate, which men admit at first hearing; because they assent to propositions which they are not taught, nor do receive the force of any argument or demonstration.” (Locke, 39).
His point is, “But this is not all the acquired knowledge in the case: the ideas themselves, about which the proposition is, are not born with them, no more than their names, but got afterwards (Locke, 41).
Physical objects in the world, such as a tree, Locke believed we only ever got to know through living in the world. He writes, “Our sense, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to various ways wherein those objects affect them.”
That a table of wood is hard, we get to know by touching the table. The first time, according to Locke, should not sufficiently convince us that all tables of wood we touch in the future will be hard, but he does believe that over time the sense acting with rationality can come to this conclusion.
“And thus,” he writes, “we come by those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all of those which we call sensible qualities; which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions.” (Locke, 87).
Locke calls this sensation. He believes that most of the ideas we have depend on our sense and are derived “by them to the understanding.” Locke would believe that the fallen tree is a phenomenon delivered to the mind through the senses which then combined with rationality and logic to create an understanding of what a falling tree would do. In order for Locke to come to his conclusions about the senses being the way to establish knowledge of the world through observation, he relied on a worldview where things are consistent and predicable. There is no room for subjectivity in, for example colors. For the Locke’s world to be logically consistent, there must be an agreed upon notion that the color yellow is the same for me and you. Likewise, because our senses confirm that a falling tree makes a sound when we are there, our senses mixed with our rationality, the fourth sort of simple idea he speaks of, can with certainty conclude that in all situations a tree falling in a forest does indeed make a sound.
Works Cited
" John Locke Biography - Facts, Birthday, Life Story - Biography.com ." Famous Biographies & TV Shows - Biography.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Aug. 2013. <http://www.biography.com/people/john-locke-9384544>.
"John Locke > The Influence of John Locke's Works (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Aug. 2013. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/influence.html>.
Locke, John. An essay concerning human understanding. Raleigh, N.C.: Alex Catalogue, 1999. Print.
