Sometimes when I try to explain my skepticism, someone or other will lament that by restricting myself so is a failure of imagination, that it must be a very drab way to live. Well, let’s talk about imagination.
The other week I heard a story of people on a train who saw, out the window a strange-looking object in the sky. Conclusions were hastily drawn, and people were soon ascribing this UFO with alien characteristics, until one piped up, “that could just be a helicopter coming towards us.” “No, no it’s clearly, obviously not of human design,” was the reply - perfectly in time for the helicopter to turn and make it clear to everyone what it was.
It’s the classic fallacy of the argument from ignorance or argument from personal incredulity:
Premise 1: X is a possible explanation for Y.
Premise 2: I can’t think of another explanation for Y.
Conclusion: X is the ONLY possible explanation for Y (or at least the most likely).
If we want to talk about failures of imagination, we only need to look as far as the second premise there. And to think, if the helicopter hadn’t turned that person still would have been adamant about what he had seen. How many similar situations have there been where the person concerned didn’t have the opportunity to see things, literally in this case, from another perspective?
The argument from ignorance is one that you see in everything from creationism to alternative medicine to psychics to almost any other area conventionally rejected by a skeptic. In fact, it’s often not a simple failure of imagination that occurs, but a dogged refusal to engage the imagination. Even when the helicopter possibility was presented, it was rejected out of hand. Maybe they are so in love with the conclusion that they don’t want to consider the alternative explanations; perhaps some of them have another agenda. Who can say?
Regardless, I am convinced that skeptics are some of the most open-minded and imaginitive people out there. It’s open-mindedness and imagination that is grounded in evidence and reason but that’s what makes it so fruitful, so worth pursuing. If you have an idea you like you might sometimes get lucky and be onto something. But progress happens as a matter of course when we dare to imagine that we are wrong.
