Reflections

Dear sir, Incomplete knowledge becomes dangerous when it is mixed with carelessness, prejudice, and a touch of superstition. These tendencies unfortunately permeate your pseudo-philosophical commentary, especially in your implicit assumptions about Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, his notion of language-games, and—crucially—his views on mathematics, probability, and randomness. These areas are not separate strands of Wittgenstein’s thought; they are deeply interconnected, and misunderstanding one leads inevitably to misunderstanding the others. This is precisely what occurs in your discussion, even if you never mention these subjects explicitly. You begin with a mistaken belief that each phenomenon must have a single, correct definition. Wittgenstein spent his entire later philosophy dismantling this notion. Whether we speak of “number,” “probability,” “randomness,” or “art,” none of these concepts has a fixed essence. Their meanings arise from the practices—mathematical, scienti...