Question: If a tree falls in a forest, and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound?

Reasonable people: Yeah, I guess. Because the mechanism that produced the sound (vibrations in the air) was still in operation. Even though nobody experienced this sound via their ears, the thing that produced the sound was still there. It’s intrinsic to the tree, which exists independently of anybody’s ears, so human beings really need to stop projecting their own narcissism all over every discussion and realise that reality exists. This is called science.

Judith Butler: What tree? If I do not see a tree, there is no tree. If collections of cells can make up an orange and an elephant and an amoeba, who’s to say that this particular collection of cells is a “tree”? A “tree” is therefore a social construct, something that humans thought up and agreed to define, and if we thought it up we can decide what it is and whether it falls or not. The only way this “tree” can be said to exist is through me, Judith Butler, experiencing the tree, and since someone else’s experience may be different from mine, words don’t mean things. This is called queer theory.

(with apologies to JCJ)