If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This morning’s post argued that socionics is folk psychology written down. This one is the folk psychologist off duty, thinking about a philosophy riddle over a second coffee. It turns out the riddle has a socionics angle. Kimani White calls one of his dichotomies the Phenomenal State, and the word “phenomenal” is exactly where the riddle lives.
Two meanings of sound
The riddle is usually pinned on George Berkeley, though he never posed it in those words. Versions turn up in popular magazines and physics textbooks around 1900. Its standard answer is that “sound” means two things. One is a pressure wave travelling through air. The other is the experience of hearing. The falling tree certainly makes the first. Without a listener, it does not make the second. Once you separate the two meanings, the puzzle mostly disappears.
John Locke had already drawn the line in 1690. Primary qualities, such as size, shape and motion, belong to objects themselves. Secondary qualities, such as colour, taste and sound as heard, are powers in objects to produce experiences in us. On Locke’s account the forest is full of vibrating air and empty of sound as heard.
Berkeley’s position was stranger and more consistent. He argued that Locke’s primary qualities are ideas too: we know shape and motion only as they appear to us. To be, for things like trees, is to be perceived. Berkeley did not conclude that the unwatched tree vanishes. He concluded that it is always perceived, by God. On his view the tree makes a sound in the forest, and the listener is never absent.
Modern readers can put God to one side and keep the useful part. Sound as heard is a phenomenon, something that exists as an appearance to a perceiver. That is the part that connects to Model L.
Kimani’s Phenomenal State
In Model L, Kimani White gives the Static/Dynamic dichotomy a name of its own: the Phenomenal State. It concerns what kind of information is most readily apparent in a type’s awareness. Dynamic types are most readily aware of continuously changing conditions. Static types are most readily aware of stable, discrete conditions. The dichotomy is defined by what shows up to a perceiver, not by what exists in the world. It is phenomenal in the strict sense.
Sound is the clearest dynamic phenomenon there is. A shape can hold still while you look at it. A sound that holds still is silence. Hearing is the experience of change unfolding in time, and when the change stops, so does the sound. So the falling tree divides along Kimani’s line:
- The fall and the crash are a dynamic event. As something heard, they exist only while they happen, and only for someone present.
- The fallen tree lying across the path is a static state. Anyone can come across it next week.
Much of the riddle’s grip comes from blurring the two. “The tree fell” names an event nobody saw and a state anybody can find. The state is never in doubt. The event, as an appearance, needed a witness.
None of this means Static types cannot hear. Every type hears the crash. The Phenomenal State concerns which kind of information stands out first. One walker in the forest remembers the moment of the crash. Another notices the gap in the canopy. That is a difference in what each finds explicit, not a difference in what either can perceive.
Two sides of Senses
Model L has a closer match to Locke’s distinction. It divides each of the eight classical elements into two monadic elements. Senses divides into Observation and Stimulation:
- Observation, the objective side, is the controlled intake of external data, with attention focused on functional detail.
- Stimulation, the subjective side, is the experience of incoming bodily stimuli, charged with the felt valence of our physical sensations.
The pressure wave belongs to Observation. It is what a microphone registers, and what a careful listener attends to when asking where the crash came from. The heard sound, startling and loud with a thud you feel in your chest, belongs to Stimulation. It cannot be separated from the one who feels it.
The fit is not perfect, and the mismatch is useful. Observation still needs a subject, since it is someone’s intake. But it is the side of Senses an instrument can stand in for. A recorder left in the forest captures what Observation would have taken in. Nothing captures what Stimulation would have felt. In Model L terms, then, the unwitnessed tree leaves a record for Observation and makes no Stimulation at all.
Static and dynamic inside the elements
Kimani’s notes on elemental overlap take this a step further. He pairs monadic elements that share a dimension, and in each pair one member is static and the other dynamic. Stimulation overlaps with Animus, the concrete side of Relations. Stimulation is the passive reception of moment-to-moment bodily experience, which is dynamic. Animus is the stable field of visceral likes and dislikes, which acts as a store for those charges and is static. Kimani’s claim is that the felt valence of a sensation comes from that standing field.
Applied to the forest, this gives a neat answer. The felt quality of the crash, frightening to one walker and thrilling to another, is a dynamic event drawing on a static disposition. The disposition belongs to the listener, and it is still there after the sound has gone. Without a listener there is no disposition to draw on, so the event has nothing to give it its felt quality.
What the riddle teaches a typist
A word of caution, in keeping with this morning’s post. None of this is socionics settling a question in metaphysics. Socionics is a theory of what people attend to and how they process it, not of what exists. Model L can say which side of Senses a heard crash belongs to. It cannot say whether Berkeley was right about trees.
What the riddle does show is the value of a distinction drawn in the right place. The tree argument goes round in circles until someone notices that “sound” has two meanings. Typing arguments do the same, until someone notices that two observers are reading different things: one the event, one the state; one the reading on the instrument, one the experience. Kimani chose the word “phenomenal” well. A type is a pattern in how the world appears to someone, and appearing always needs a someone.
