The paper concludes that the black swan concept should be associated with a surprising extreme event relative to the present knowledge.ĭespite a plethora of tools, technologies and management systems, successful execution of big science and engineering projects remains problematic. The main aim of this paper is to contribute to a clarification of the issue in order to strengthen the foundations of the meaning and characterisation of risk, and in this way provide a basis for improved risk management. In this paper we carry out an in-depth analysis of what a black swan means in relation to risk, uncertainty and probability: is a black swan just an extreme event with a very low probability or is it a more surprising event in some sense, for example an unknown unknown? We question how the black swans are linked to the risk concep t, to expected values and probabilities, and to the common distinction between aleatory uncertainties and epistemic uncertainties. A key issue has been the ability of risk assessment and probability theory to capture the black swans. In recent years there has been much focus on the so-called black swans in relation to risk management and decision making under uncertainty. These arguments build the basis for a modest realism about the future. Furthermore, it will be outlined that the often cited notion of future’s openness also rests on such inferential knowledge, which indicates incoherence in the skeptics’ approach. To show this, some examples that illustrate how the future has a lock on us will be discussed.

Theory building departs by inferring from present observations into both directions, future and past. Giving that we cannot observe the past but claim to know a lot about, I will argue that a commitment to the correspondence theory of truth is too strong a requirement for robust knowledge about the future. However, it is debatable whether such a criterion is generally required for robust knowledge. It is clearly true as has been pointed out that knowledge about the future cannot be tested to correspond with reality, since the future does not yet exist. In my article I will present some objections to these approaches. While these approaches are meaningful in their own right, they basically rest on a too sceptical foundation.

Hence, hermeneutic TA, forensics of wishing and other approaches shift their focus on the present of such futures. Being faced with bold statements about the technological future, the wickedness of technological systems and our frequent cluelessness when aiming at predicting the course of such systems, scholars from philosophy of technology and Technology Assessment (TA) have given up believing that any method can enhance our knowledge about the future.

The black swan highly improbable