This is an obvious false dichotomy, there is no wrong answer. However, to play the game I'd say it is half full, because the standard condition of a glas is empty, therefore you have to fill it in order to make it half full.
However, to play the game I'd say it is half full, because the standard condition of a glas is empty, therefore you have to fill it in order to make it half full.
I could say the opposite. A glass is a container, the purpose of its existence is to be filled. Anytime it's not completely filled it isn't accomplishing that purpose and thus the emptiness stands out.
No. There is no such thing as "half full" or "half empty", just as there is no such thing as a "half on" light switch or a "half tails" coin flip. The state of the container is "half capacity".
He said that the bottom half is full and the top half is empty.
This also begs the question of what constitutes full capacity. ~10^12kg of matter can occupy 1mL with room to spare, so a thinly-spread vapour isn't going to be filling much.
Why? If you have a bottle with half capacity filled by a liquid and the rest a vacuum, that already defeats your point.
It's full of whatever is inside it if it is evenly distributed.
Actually I'm more of a mind with FishPreferred, if the gas filling the bottle is only at half its habitual pressure, the bottle can be considered at half capacity; otherwise you would have to assume that the bottle can be equally full when containing different amount of matter, which is counter-intuitive. Of course that also means that unlike for solids and liquids, a bottle can be filled by more than its capacity if you pressurize the gas, which is not entirely intuitive either.
