Delphic ambiguity is forecasting which is heavily qualified or subject to misinterpretation—a practice attributed to an
oracle of Delphi
An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophecy, prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by Deity, deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divina ...
,
who answered a question by saying that a great empire would fall if
Croesus
Croesus ( ; ; Latin: ; reigned:
)
was the Monarch, king of Lydia, who reigned from 585 BC until his Siege of Sardis (547 BC), defeat by the Persian king Cyrus the Great in 547 or 546 BC. According to Herodotus, he reigned 14 years. Croesus was ...
crossed the
River Halys, which was a logical step in his plan to attack the
Persian Empire
The Achaemenid Empire or Achaemenian Empire, also known as the Persian Empire or First Persian Empire (; , , ), was an Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty in 550 BC. Based in modern-day Iran, it was the larg ...
. Such ambiguities are often presumed intentional in their superficial appearance of providing more information than critical examination of their content would support—for example, that famous prophecy might be expected to "come true" ''whichever'' of those two respective kingdoms' armies was
defeated in detail at the battle which in due course took place beyond that river.
Professional economic projections are sometimes labelled as delphic because of the degree of conditional detail forced by variables that can at best only be estimated.
References
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Forecasting