Randomness is invoked as if it were a property of reality itself. Radioactive decay is random, quantum jumps are random, mutations are random. The word carries an aura of brute fact: uncaused, patternless, ontologically given.
But randomness is never observed — it is inferred from our framing. It is a statement of epistemic stance, not a feature of the world. To call something random is to confess ignorance of pattern, or to elevate statistical regularity into metaphysical truth. Randomness is not a property of events; it is a gloss on our construal of them.
By treating randomness as ontological, physics disguises a limit of knowledge as a feature of being. In doing so, it mistakes modality (degrees of likelihood, structured possibility) for modulation (a force of nature itself). Randomness, like law and initial condition, is a rhetorical artefact: the residue of construal turned into the substance of reality.
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