Self-evident & Trivial

In recent years, combinations of terms have become popular where one component is „computational“ or some relative of it, whereas the other is „aesthetics“ or „art“ or „creativity“, etc. The Dagstuhl seminar, to which this personal note owes its appearance, had the number 09291 and the title Computational Creativity: an Interdisciplinary Approach. Good old C. P. Snow would probably like such terms as signs of a conscious effort to bridge the gap between the „two cultures“: from the scientific culture (home of „computational“) to the literary („creativity“), and back again1. We have seen computational aesthetics, computer art (the oldest of them all), aesthetic computing, machine aesthetics, creative computation, computational creativity, and more. It is always absolutely boring to ask for a precise definition – a definition, not an explanation2 – of a complex term, in hope of making our ideas clear3, even though philosophers throughout the centuries have tried nothing but exactly this, and not only philosophers did so. How much have we, when we were young, indulged in endless debates about the meaning of a word. Ludwig Wittgenstein has given us the ultimate answer to all4 questions of the kind: „What is x?“ He says: the meaning of a word is its use in the language (Philosophical Investigations, no. 43). Clear, helpful, and pragmatic. Don’t think, look – is Wittgenstein’s advice to his fellow philosophers. Look, that is, how real living people are using the word you want to understand. They will, quite likely, use it differently from place to place, and from time to time. I guess, it is allowed to extend the contextual condition of „... in the language“ to „in society“. It is a society that develops a language. And it is a language that determines to a large extent what a society is. From a certain perspective, and certainly from the perspective of C. P. Snow, language and society are more or less the same. Apply Wittgenstein’s insight to the torture sessions professors and teachers like so much. They arrange for meetings with their students that they call „exams“. The only purpose those meetings appear to have is to fail those poor guys and girls. They fail them if students upon certain questions do not pro-