Now we’re all saying almost the same things:
Phillip says:
I would argue that the universe is a personal experience, an internal event.
If so inclined we can compare notes and arrive at a place called consensus reality.
This is correct (or, at least, it matches my view of things), except that our personal experience is still described by words and sentences from the common pool. Consensus reality is the reality that those sentences establish: the facts, and it shapes, to a large extent, the nature of our internal events.
This shared space has some pretty strict rules about what we can say about it but as long as you color between the lines we pretty much let you get away with picking your own crayons (words).
Lines are drawn in consensus reality by the group experience, over time, and are subject to change. I guess one can call the lines arbitrary but I would call them pragmatic. They are stable enough to allow us to communicate on a fairly effective level (look at civilization <not too close>).
Here, I get confused trying to match up what Phillip is saying to my vision. I don’t think that there’s a lot that is arbitrary in scientific description, however. The names are arbitrary and we can order our descriptions according to different sets of arbitrary presuppositions (Newtonian or Ptolemaic, for example), but from the presuppositions combined with the evidence of the facts, the rest pretty much follows. (And whether or not all that follows is also consistent with the facts is the test of a good theory, good presuppositions.) And the facts are probably going to be stable for at least our lifetimes– it is only when dealing with distant times (past or future) or spaces (interior or exterior to the sphere of ordinary action) that we run into real problems with objects acting funny. The world is in an important sense ‘the world for us’, but it is no less real for being seen from a limited perspective. In metaphorical speech, however, the possibilities are infinite, and the choices arbitrary in a logical sense, although they are chosen for a particular effect.
And Vincent offers:
When I think of "sound" I think of the audible perception of vibrations by an observer. Until the vibrations are observed audibly, they are only vibrations. When they are observed audibly they become "sound" or even "a sound," a title which can be used to loosely identify a familiar set of vibrations: "I hear a sound" can be used interchangably with "I hear a gunshot" in the event a gunshot is heard. One statement is more specific than the other, but they are both somewhat accurate, and can both be used to communicate effectively.
Unless you want to get really specific and say that you "perceive audibly the vibrations from a gunshot event." If people ever start talking this way, I'll cry.
Anyway, that's what color my sound crayon is.
This is one example of the way that names are arbitrary– they can be more or less specific, and still be accurate. They are also arbitrary in that they can be from different languages, or even from codes or made up languages, as long as there is someone who understands the references.
And sometimes I do agree with Phillip, in thinking that we go on too long about these things (too many words). But this feeling usually only comes when it’s about time to change subjects.
I’m trying to make a transition soon to the subject and other topics connected to the limits of the world in Wittgenstein’s thinking, (such as ethics– remember the question about lies?) but I want to be sure that I’ve not left anything unfinished, and, to be honest, I’m not sure I’m thinking things clearly enough to move on just yet. Sorry about that. I’ll provide something newer and more interesting as soon as I can.
10:56:00 PM 
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