Imagination and skepticism

I have come to wonder of late whether or not much that is commonly regarded as skepticism is merely a lack of imaginative power on the part of the alleged skeptic. In other words, I am skeptical of the skeptic’s claim to be skeptical.

Real skepticism consists in the ability to question one’s own unquestioned assumptions, and to put those assumptions on trial with the same objectivity as if they were not one’s own. It is an exercise of the imagination. It is much the same as the exercise of the imagination reading science fiction demands of the reader: the ability to picture what the world would be like if the rules of the world were different than current knowledge says.

Science fiction has been called speculative fiction but could be called skeptical fiction. All other genres, from Westerns to Romances to Detective stories, invent persons and props and places and details, but they do not invent new worlds with new laws of nature. Science fiction is the genre where we ask questions like: how does the invisible man see?

There is no need to answer this question in a muggle genre, since there are no invisible men in Westerns and Romances and so on, for invisible men do not exist in our world as we know it and never did. The Invisible Man cannot exist under our rules of nature or our current technology ability to exploit those rules (albeit in a few years, this statement may be out of date).

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.