On Oracles and The Open Society
“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” — Hume
Consider the classical proposition: All swans are white.
There is nothing oracular about it. No priest may place a tripod over it. No vapors slip through cracks in its floor for the Pythia to inhale.
The statement is plain, simple, unambiguous. It is falsifiable, and it happens to be false: Some swans are black.
Still the logician loves it.
“In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.” ― Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery
The statement’s beauty is not found in its truth value, but in its form.
Courage entails risk. Knowledge entails risk. Truth risks being wrong.
The statement puts its neck out for us:
All swans are white.
Because it can be wrong, we can learn from it. It opens the gate to knowledge, and the way to freedom.
Falsifiable propositions do not inspire us to flee—Oedipus-like—out of anxiety or the fear of finding them true.
They do not oppress. They invite our questions and tell us how to test them. They submit to criticism, allowing us to discover and correct errors.
They do not provide a path to absolute certainty. They set up the search.
All we have to find is a single non-white swan, and we know for certain that not all swans are white.
But notice that we can only know with certainty what is not true. We cannot know with certainty what is true. No matter how many white swans we find, we can never prove that all swans are white.
Omniscience is ruled out.
Tomorrow may surprise us yet, and wake us from our dogmatic slumber.
Delphi demanded sacrificial goats, not black swans.
Croesus, the last king of Lydia, made his offering to the oracle, and took comfort in the Pythia’s pronouncement that if he led his country to war, a great empire would fall.
The statement was unfalsifiable. If he won, a great empire would fall. If he lost, a great empire would fall. If he did nothing, he would be left to wonder.
He went to war, and lost. Lydia fell.
The fulfillment of the prophecy did not prove the oracle wise.
It revealed a fool.
Oedipus fled Corinth to prevent the oracle from proving true. Then he stained his hands with his father’s blood, married his mother, and fathered children who were also his siblings.
At no moment could he have proven the oracle false. It tyrannized him. He could not meaningfully question it. He could only wait and watch for its apparent fulfillment, whether by choice or by accident.
Yet he acted on it, blindly.
It was not knowledge he acted on, but suspicion.
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