I’ve started investigating the subtleties of a certain well-known phenomenon, using variations of the hypothetical case of the death of Damocles: the phenomenon of somehow “interesting” coincidences.
For the time being, I shall keep that wording: various terms are widely in use for our phenomenon, but I’d like to avoid these, since they carry strong and distorting connotations. I’ll call our phenomenon, simply and preliminarily, and entirely non-terminologically, interesting coincidences.
These cases of coincidences are interesting not in any strong sense, of course: I don’t want to say that everybody has to find them so. They’re interesting for our purposes here: I found them interesting enough to write about them, and presumably (since you’re still reading this), you find them interesting enough to read what I have to say. The term coincidence is more technical, and not without baggage; but it is fairly neutral, and straightforwardly understood. It preserves something that I won’t dispute, namely that the phenomenon involves two or more goings-on (“happenings”) which occur together, as implied by the “co”-prefix: something co-incides.
What in addition justifies the label interesting, moreover, is that when a coincidence of that kind occurs, we feel a (vague) need for “explanations”. I’ve already started exploring that aspect; what exactly it is that should be explained is hard to grasp, but we have at least reached a point where it got clear that if interesting coincidences need explanation, what we’re looking for is not an explanation for each (or any) of the events, separately. It’s their falling together (or perhaps their falling together with something else) which is in the focus as explanandum. That’s another reason to keep coincidence terminologically central.
