What happened when oracular consultations “failed”? Modern scholarship tends to emphasize how ancient Greek oracular consultation provided clarity and a sense of control for its clients. In contrast, myriad tales about oracles from across ancient literature tell of hopes raised and dashed, mortals who misunderstand, and oracles that mislead. This essay suggests that we might productively explore these stories as responses to an important aspect of ancient lived experience: specifically, when the events that an oracle had foretold did not occur. Focusing on oracles concerned with the foundations of settlements, this essay begins by examining how scholars have previously explained such apparent oracular failures by appealing to a combination of “structural blocks to falsifiability” (e.g., mortal misunderstanding) and ancient piety. Drawing on psychological theories and anthropological studies of failed prophecy, this essay offers an alternative account of the ways in which failed oracular pronouncements were explored, explained, and managed by those who received them. Stories of oracular failure reveal how creatively cultural resources – from storytelling to cult foundation – were employed to preserve the core concepts of communities and their cultures.

We begin by demonstrating the importance of the ideas of Karl Popper to corpus linguistics. On that basis we begin an exploration of his ideas in order to understand both his account of the scientific method and how this method may illuminate aspects of the corpus-based approach to the study of language.

We define canonicity as a variable property of all cultural discourses: it refers to the extent to which the components of a given discourse – its terms, texts, practices, etc – tend to inhere within it over time. Law and religion may both be characterized as strongly canonical discourses, meaning that they tend not to change over time. This property stems from the particular functions that law and religion play within human culture; hence it is not dependent on the political ends to which law and religion are often used.

We follow Peter Berger’s assertion that any religion posits a particular conception of the cosmos; hence religion is irreducibly descriptive. In contradistinction to science, the descriptive elements of religion are generally not falsifiable by empirical observation. This resistance to falsification is what makes religion strongly canonical.

In contrast, legal discourse is irreducibly prescriptive. It is distinct from other prescriptive systems, such as morality, in the paramount value it places on consistency, both at any given moment and over time. This diachronic consistency is reflected in the fact that, once established, laws tend to remain in force until formally changed or annulled; this is the strong canonicity of law.

The hubris of economists is astonishing. While they regularly look to other disciplines for topics of study, they all too rarely engage seriously with those fields. Building on the arguments in our book Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities (2017), we contend that while economics is more important than ever, its glaring deficiencies are unnecessary. Most strikingly, even behavioral economists usually neglect culture, have a simplistic and unrealistic depiction of human behavior, and assume away genuine irrationalities. We offer an alternative: an economics that not only learns from literature, philosophy, and the other humanities, but also from history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science. Embracing those fields could lead economists to develop more realistic models of human behavior, recognize that they should not be so confident about their predictions, and produce more effective and just policies.

In this book, we have explored the view that there is ample empirical evidence to suggest that the full range of mental grammatical knowledge, from morphemes to abstract syntactic patterns, can best be described as constructions. We have seen that Construction Grammar can explain how children acquire English and that it provides a cognitively plausible account of the synchronic variation of Englishes across the globe as well as the diachronic changes that affected the English language over the centuries. In this final chapter, I will show you how we can bring together everything that we have learnt so far to analyse authentic constructs. As you know, outside of textbooks, constructs are often going to be fairly complex and will involve the activation of a multitude of constructions. I will, therefore, introduce you to a representation system (Constructional Approach to Syntactic Analysis; Herbst and Hoffmann 2018) that allows us to illustrate the various constructions that combine to produce complex utterances. Then, I will conclude the book by briefly discussing some phenomena that I, personally, think are currently emerging as ‘hot topics’ in constructionist research.

The discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in 1985 is chronicled, making the analogy with the concept of the “black swan,” a metaphor for unprecedented events. The ozone layer in the stratosphere acts as a shield for life on the Earth, by blocking harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Concern mounted in the 1970s that compounds known as chlorofluorocarbons, used as refrigerants and coolants, could be slowly destroying the ozone layer. Joe Farman and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) found that ozone levels in the stratosphere had dropped dramatically during the Antarctic spring season in the 1980s, creating a “hole” in the ozone layer. US scientist Susan Solomon led an expedition to make measurements of the ozone hole and worked with colleagues to explain the cause: cold Antarctic temperatures allowed the formation of polar stratospheric clouds that catalyzed chemical reactions involving CFCs, leading to rapid ozone loss.

This chapter summarizes the results from Chapters 4-8 and speculates on a question that is posed at the start of the book: Why is it that Milgrom’s theory, in spite of its remarkable successes, has been so widely ignored by standard-model cosmologists? It is argued that the approach of standard-model cosmologists to theory corroboration is different from that of Milgromian researchers: the first behave like verificationists, the second like critical rationalists. Unlike Milgrom’s theory, the standard cosmological model has made few if any successful novel predictions, and so it is understandable that standard-model cosmologists have gravitated toward a methodology that favors verification over critical rationalism.

Scientific epistemology begins from the idea that the truth of a universal statement, such as a scientific law, can never be conclusively proved. No matter how successful a hypothesis has been in the past, it can always turn out to make incorrect predictions when applied in a new situation. Karl Popper argued that the most important experimental results are those that falsify a theory, and he proposed falsifiability as a criterion for distinguishing science from pseudoscience. Popper argued in addition that scientists should respond to falsifications in a particular way: not by ad hoc adjustments of their theories, but in a way that expands the theory’s explanatory content. Popper argued that the success of a modified theory should be judged in terms of its success at making new predictions. Popper’s view of epistemology, which is shared by many scientists and philosophers of science, is called “critical rationalism.” An epistemology that judges success purely in terms of a theory’s success at explaining known facts is called “verificationism.” Popper argued that verificationism is equivalent to a belief in induction, and that induction is a fallacy.

This chapter guides the reader in moving from a general interest in neuroscience to a specific testable hypothesis.