> Who has choices need not choose. > We must, who have none. > We can love but what we lose - > What is gone is gone. > > Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn We tend to underestimate just how deeply uncertainty permeates our lives. It is everywhere—woven into the very fabric of existence—yet we struggle to see it clearly. One reason for this is language. The word **uncertain** has a problem of **boundaries**. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s a word that bleeds into adjacent meanings, tangled up with similar but distinct ideas that obscure its true nature. This isn’t unusual. Language often strains against the edges of meaning. Take the word **love**—a single term that somehow stretches to cover the bond between a mother and her child, the passion of new lovers, the camaraderie of soldiers, and the quiet companionship of a couple who have spent half a century together. That’s a lot of emotional ground for one word to cover. Uncertainty faces a similar problem. It resists neat definition, slipping into associations that blur rather than clarify. To untangle this conceptual knot, we need to do some semiotic surgery. We need to redraw the boundaries around what uncertainty actually means. This matters because words are tools for capturing abstract ideas. Consider the word **bird**—it doesn’t refer to any one specific bird, but to a general category of creatures. And that category works by doing three things: 1. It **includes** a set of defining properties (e.g., beak, feathers, wings). 2. It arranges those features in a meaningful **order** (e.g., in a structure that enables flight, or at least suggests it). 3. It **excludes** everything that doesn’t fit (colour, size, location—details that are incidental rather than essential). Ideas work the same way. They are defined as much by what they **contain** as by what they **omit**. So if we want to truly understand uncertainty, we need to sharpen its conceptual boundaries. A good starting point? The words we often mistake for synonyms. A quick dive into dictionaries reveals a long list of candidates: - *Indeterminate, dubious, unknown, vague, ambiguous, indefinite, obscure* (lack of clarity or trust in knowledge) - *Unpredictable* (a statement about our (in)ability to make forecasts) - *Capricious, changeable, fickle, fluctuating, fluid, inconsistent, mercurial, skittish, temperamental, unsettled, unstable, unsteady, variable, volatile* (variations on dynamic change) At first glance, this might seem like a random word-soup, but a pattern quickly emerges. These words don’t describe uncertainty itself. They describe our relationship with uncertainty—our struggles with **knowledge**, **prediction**, and **change**. Specifically, they highlight our failures in these areas. The ways we fall short in acquiring knowledge, in making reliable forecasts, in adapting smoothly to shifting conditions. And here’s where things get interesting: this confusion isn’t just linguistic. It reflects something deeper—uncertainty is embedded in our cognition because it is embedded in life itself. Every living organism, from the simplest bacteria to the most complex minds, exists in a constant state of negotiation with the unknown. All life forms acquire knowledge about their niche, use it to make predictions, and adapt dynamically to change. They operate in an ongoing feedback loop, optimising their behaviour for survival in a world that is always in flux. In other words, uncertainty isn’t just a human problem. It is a fundamental condition of life. A feature, not a bug. The inescapable consequence of trying to make sense of an infinite unknown with finite cognitive and metabolic resources. Uncertainty isn’t just something we deal with—it’s part of the machinery that allows us, and every other living thing, to exist at all. [[Epistemic Lenses|Next page]]