work-blog/articles/drafts/the-oracle-problem.md

title	date	topics	related	abstract
The Oracle Problem	2026-04-20	philosophy epistemology craft		The uniquely testing-flavoured version of "how do we know?" is: how do we know what "correct" means? An oracle is whatever tells a test whether an output is right, and in practice oracles are requirements, expectations, customer satisfaction, and regulator sign-off — all of which can conflict.

The Oracle Problem. This is the most glaring missing piece. Your entire framework asks how do we know? — but you haven't yet tackled the uniquely testing-flavoured version: how do we know what "correct" means? An oracle is whatever tells a test whether an output is right. In your world, oracles are sometimes requirements, sometimes expectations, sometimes customer satisfaction, sometimes regulator sign-off — and they conflict. Elaine Weyuker's original 1982 paper¹ on the oracle assumption and Doug Hoffman's "Heuristic Test Oracles"² are the obvious anchors. This also unifies your Categories-of-Testing triad: each of the three fact-kinds has its own oracle species.

---

1. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1093/comjnl/25.4.465 ↩︎

2. https://www.stickyminds.com/article/heuristic-test-oracles ↩︎