"Chance is a name for our ignorance"
About this Quote
Stephen’s line doesn’t comfort; it indicts. “Chance” isn’t treated as a real force in the world so much as a linguistic convenience, the label we slap onto events when the causes are too tangled, too hidden, or too embarrassing to admit we don’t know. The bite is in the grammar: not “chance exists,” but “chance is a name.” That phrasing demotes randomness from metaphysics to vocabulary, turning a supposedly objective explanation into a confession of human limits.
The intent is unmistakably Victorian in its confidence that the universe is, at base, legible. Stephen is writing in the long shadow of Darwin, industrial science, and a culture increasingly addicted to causal stories. Calling something “chance” can sound like humility, but Stephen hears a dodge: if we can’t trace the chain of reasons, we outsource the mystery to fate’s PR department. The subtext is a quiet rebuke of superstition and lazy storytelling. It’s also a warning to intellectuals who treat “random” as a philosophy rather than a placeholder.
What makes it work is how it collapses a big debate - providence versus accident, determinism versus randomness - into a brisk moral claim about epistemology. He doesn’t argue that events are never random; he argues that our talk about randomness often reveals more about our cognitive blind spots than about reality itself. In an age drowning in data and still surprised by outcomes, the line lands as both critique and mirror: “chance” is where explanation goes to die, unless curiosity keeps it alive.
The intent is unmistakably Victorian in its confidence that the universe is, at base, legible. Stephen is writing in the long shadow of Darwin, industrial science, and a culture increasingly addicted to causal stories. Calling something “chance” can sound like humility, but Stephen hears a dodge: if we can’t trace the chain of reasons, we outsource the mystery to fate’s PR department. The subtext is a quiet rebuke of superstition and lazy storytelling. It’s also a warning to intellectuals who treat “random” as a philosophy rather than a placeholder.
What makes it work is how it collapses a big debate - providence versus accident, determinism versus randomness - into a brisk moral claim about epistemology. He doesn’t argue that events are never random; he argues that our talk about randomness often reveals more about our cognitive blind spots than about reality itself. In an age drowning in data and still surprised by outcomes, the line lands as both critique and mirror: “chance” is where explanation goes to die, unless curiosity keeps it alive.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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