Your Ability to Imagine a Scenario Does Not Make It “Theoretically Possible”

or, Where Imagination Does and Does Not Help You Understand What Is Possible

Stuart K. Hayashi

Introduction
In my home state of Hawai‘i, superstitions abound. Every New Year’s Eve, one does not merely practice particular rituals but also eats particular foods. I have been assured that this will please the spirits and they will reward us with good fortune throughout the year. I think these celebratory rituals can be fine and maybe even wholesome when recognized and practiced just as general symbols of desire for happy outcomes. But I worry when they take on priority because it is believed, on some level, that they might be true literally. When I ask different people if they believe in all this literally, they usually give the same reply. They shrug, laugh sheepishly, and say, “Well, ya never know. It’s possible there might be something to all this.” People believe this might possibly be true simply because they can imagine it.

This notion that if you can imagine a scenario, that proves that it is possible, is very common. It serves as the major excuse for belief in the supernatural, such as fortunetelling, ghosts, demons, and deities. It is also a rationalization that underpins so much pretentiousness in formal philosophy.

This is may be familiar to you. It has become routine that, after taking Philosophy 101 class, someone will say, “Gee, maybe my whole life is not real. Maybe all of my experiences are an illusion, and I am actually a brain in a jar imagining my life. This is theoretically possible.”

Such talk was popular long before the release of The Matrix. It has an extensive history of being entertained copiously in formal philosophy, in some form or another. Immanuel Kant had a version of it, and it is famously associated with Plato. The idea was also extolled by the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zi. He said that one day he dreamed he was a butterfly, but maybe he is actually a butterfly dreaming that it is Zhuang Zi. Buying into the assertion that what we interpret as sensory evidence might all be misleading, the philosopher Karl Popper proclaimed seriously, “...we never know what we are talking about.” (To that I reply, “Speak for yourself, buddy!”) And although Rene Descartes ultimately did not affirm his agreement with this idea, he still presumed it deserving of very serious consideration. 

There is also the nineteenth-century Romanticist poet William Blake. Blake famously disparaged scientists in general and Isaac Newton in particular. In his estimation, for Newton to discover the principles of Nature is to rob Nature of its beauty and wonder. I rebut that assertion here. Along lines similar to these other fantasists about imagination, Blake asserts, “Everything possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.” Hence Blake constructs a straw-man misrepresentation of rationality that is most unflattering. He pronounces, “The idiot Reasoner laughs at the Man of Imagination.”

Disturbingly, the Enlightenment Era philosopher David Hume was explicit in saying that his ability to imagine a scenario was sufficient grounds for deeming it a theoretic possibility that deserves your study. This starkly contradicts Hume’s reputation among today’s professors — that he was a strict empiricist all about sensory experience. As worded by Hume, “To form a clear idea of any thing [that is, to imagine something vividly] is an undeniable argument for its possibility and is alone refutation of any pretended demonstration against it.”

We will return to this erroneous supposition of Hume’s a bit later in this essay. Although Hume made some very sound arguments for free-market economics and having a laissez-faire and constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State, much of his influence in the area of epistemology, such as with what he has said above, has contributed to setting much of Western society on the wrong track. It is based on his own arbitrary imaginings that Hume pronounces that all conclusions from inductive reason are perennially and existentially suspect, as a philosopher “cannot defend his reason by reason.”

People who indulge in this talk — that being able to imagine something is proof that it is possible — have no actual basis for doing so.

I already knew that years ago, and I would offer them this same reply.

I can imagine an isolated ice cube falling to the bottom of a glass of water and remaining on the bottom for eternity. My ability to imagine this is still no basis for introducing this scenario as a theoretic possibility. For a proposition to be worth some consideration as a theoretic possibility, there must be evidence to support it.

And, as far as I was concerned, that was that. However, on Thursday, July 27, 2023, I came up with some additional points about this. These additional points, I think, make use of more-formal logic. My new manner of phrasing the matter goes farther down to the foundation of metaphysics and epistemology. The main purpose of the essay you are reading is for me to present my argument in this new form. But, first, I must give some background information that serves as the basis for my new argument.

 

 
The Context Behind the Issue
This idea that your sensory experiences might be distorted or illusory, and that there might be a truer plane of existence with which you have not yet made contact, is called metaphysical Idealism. This is not to be mixed up with moral Idealism, which is a persisting commitment to ethical principles. And the ramifications of metaphysical Idealism are not confined to metaphysics. In the realm of epistemology — the discipline that studies how do we know what we know — metaphysical Idealism is frequently accompanied by epistemic Rationalism, which should not be confused with rationality.

This epistemic Rationalism is the notion that there are valid and true ideas we hold that are innate, à priori, and which are truer than knowledge that we can induce à posteriori, meaning from from sensory experience. Someone can be a Rationalist without agreeing that it is theoretically possible that all sensory experience is suspect or misleading or illusory. Still, being an epistemic Rationalist is a very convenient position for someone who agrees that all sensory experience is illusory.

For a metaphysical Idealist, epistemic Rationalism is supposed to answer the question, “If everything learned from sensory evidence is subject to doubt, how do you know that all of that sensory evidence is thrown into doubt?” Once again, people say that their ability to imagine that waking experience is an illusion is enough to make it a theoretic possibility. Those who are most adamant in metaphysical Idealism and epistemic Rationalism go farther, saying they know all this conjecture is a legitimate evaluation.

There is a name for this idea that your consciousness can recognize truths — truths about entities that exist outside of your  own consciousness — independently of investigation of those entities by means of sensory experience. That is, the idea is that even if no one ever investigated the matter by means of sensory experience, you can still know what is true about the entities existing outside of your own consciousness, entities such as trees and flowers and volcanoes and clouds and galaxies and other humans.

The name also applies to a still-more-radical idea. The more-radical idea is that, independent of going through sensory motions to affect the entities outside of your own consciousness, your consciousness alone can will those entities outside of your consciousness to change their nature and behavior. The name that the writer Ayn Rand gave those ideas is “the Primacy of Consciousness.”

It is true that your own consciousness can sometimes influence the entities outside of it. But your consciousness can do this only by means of going through motions with the realm of sensory experience, not merely thinking with your consciousness but acting in reality, through physical motions, to implement the ideas from your consciousness.

For example, the Wright brothers conceived of — imagined — heavier-than-air flying machines when none had existed. Then, through their efforts, they created airplanes in reality. In this respect, what once manifested only in their imaginations had also become real entities that existed independently of their consciousness.

But they did this through sensory experience. They observed that, as birds flew, the birds changed the direction of their flight by changing the direction of their wings and the angles at which edges of their wings had bent. The brothers then employed their bodies to draw up plans and diagrams that they formulated to accommodate such observations. They built models and prototypes of a flyer, and they employed their senses to observe the results of tests they ran on such prototypes. By contrast, for the Wright brothers to employ a Primacy-of-Consciousness mindset would have been for them merely to attempt to wish or pray airplanes into being. After all, their father was a priest. 

Likewise, here is another example of the Primacy of Consciousness. Suppose that on Monday, I pray that Hawai‘i will not be hit with an earthquake on Tuesday. Then, on Tuesday, Hawaii experiences no earthquake. Then I chalk up the absence of such a disaster to my having prayed to God. I still performed a physical action — I put my hands together and spoke with my mouth. But there is no evidence that this had any causal effect on seismic activity. Moreover, because God supposedly can read my mind, it probably would have been just as effectual if only in my head did I ask God that there to be no earthquake. Hence, this is the Primacy of Consciousness at play.

It is also the Primacy of Consciousness when my loved ones eat a particular dish on New Year’s Eve to bring good luck. Here, good luck refers to steady finances and the good fortune of a hurricane not hitting Hawai‘i months later. Again, this ritual does involve a physical action with entities outside of people’s consciousness. Still, there is no actual evidence of a causal connection between eating a particular food and Hawai‘i having averted a catastrophe. In practice, this is the same as trying to wish away the tropical storms.

In contrast to the Primacy of Consciousness, Ayn Rand discusses the Primacy of Existence. It starts with the most obvious observation you can make — something exists. Something that exists is called an “entity.” Your recognition that something exists will produce a corollary recognition: a consciousness exists — your own. Were it not for Existence, there would not be something there for your consciousness to recognize, and there would definitely be no consciousness there to recognize it. Likewise, were it not for Consciousness, there would not be anything to recognize the existence of itself or anything else.

Your consciousness is clearly important. But when it comes to your consciousness recognizing what is real and true, or at least theoretically possible, looking at Existence must be the starting point. In the realm of Existence — what I also call Nature with a capital N — we find there are some principles that apply consistently. The law of gravity is an example.

And every entity has attributes through which your consciousness can distinguish it from other entities. The pertinent attributes of an entity are what we call the entity’s nature. It is in a tree’s nature, for example, to consist of cells, to grow, and to release oxygen as it takes in sunlight to produce its own food. By contrast, it is not in the nature of a tree to transform into a 400-meter-long rhinoceros and stampede over a city. We discover the respective natures of entities through repeat observations with the senses.

Recognition of an entity by its pertinent attributes is Aristotle’s Law of Identity. Here is how you apply that law. You observe one entity, Entity 1, whose attributes allow you to place it in a particular classification, a particular category — the concept of it. Then you observe Entity 2, which shares the same pertinent attributes as the first entity. Applying the Law of Identity, you recognize Entity 2 as being of the same category as Entity 1.

Entities perform actions. A cloud above you is an entity, and it sending raindrops down upon you is its action. Actions are caused by the respective natures of entities. In the past, when you observed clouds become a very dark gray, these clouds followed up by raining upon you. Today you see another cloud that is a dark gray. Applying the Law of Identity, you predict that this dark gray cloud will likewise send rain.

Derivative of the Law of Identity is the Law of Causality. The fact that entities have particular respective natures is a fact that affects the events that these entities cause. When two entities are of the same type, A, and they are under the same set of pertinent conditions, B, the same stimulus, X, will cause them to react in the same manner, Y.

We have two mobile phones, A, that are similar enough in the pertinent context to be regarded as being of the same type. These are phones 1 and 2. Both of them are under the same condition, B — they are not broken. On Phone 1, I input your phone number. This is the stimulus or causal agent X. This results in your phone ringing, effect Y. Applying the Law of Identity, we ascertain that if, after you have hung up from the first call, I punch in your number on Phone 2 as well, it will likewise cause your phone to ring. We infer that the action of my inputting your number will be consistent in causing your phone to ring. As Ayn Rand phrases it, “The Law of Causality is the Law of Identity applied to action.”

These are the same sensory observations denigrated by metaphysical Idealism, epistemic Rationalism, and, implicitly, by all those who presume that their ability to imagine a scenario is sufficient to prove that it is possible.

Again, the vast majority of philosophy instructors will tell you that David Hume was a consistent empiricist. That is, he was the opposite of a metaphysical Idealist and epistemic Rationalist, of which Plato was both. If they could put aside their prejudicially motivated revulsion toward Ayn Rand long enough to learn her terminology, philosophy instructors would say that admirers of Ayn Rand’s should concede that Hume argued from “the Primacy of Existence.” But I find, sadly, that what Hume has said about imagination and theoretical possibilities is an instance of him showing favor to the Primacy of Consciousness.

In contrast to metaphysical Idealists, epistemic Rationalists, and — in this instance at least — David Hume, I shall now present my new argument about why a posited scenario must have evidentiary backing before it is to be welcomed as a theoretic possibility.

 

 
My New Way of Phrasing It
Again, many people in Hawai‘i say that it is theoretically possible that if we appease spirits on New Year’s Eve by eating a particular lucky food, those spirits will help protect us throughout the year. And, again, many people chirp that it is theoretically possible that their whole lives are an illusion and they are actually a brain in a jar being made to dream the dream that is their lives.

As with any supernaturalistic claim, these people begin by imagining a scenario arbitrarily, and then they try to rationalize it after the fact. This approach exemplifies the Primacy-of-Consciousness mindset. Now let us proceed from the other end. Let us acknowledge the Primacy of Existence.

We start off by looking at entities — the objects that exist. To speak of what is “possible” is to speak of a judgment made about some posited event. “Events” are just actions performed by the entities. That is why we look at the entities before we consider their actions and the events or possibilities associated with them. Moreover, the qualities of an action are influenced by the qualities of the entity performing it. Hence, it is only by learning about entities and their attributes that we ascertain what is possible for them.

That is why there is no proper basis or justification for us to speak of what is “theoretically possible” for an entity in the absence of observational knowledge of that entity’s attributes. Facts and evidence about an entity are epistemically foundational, and “possible” is a derivative attribute of that entity’s actions that hinges on such an epistemic foundation.

To be rationally justified, then, in saying that an event is theoretically possible is to say the following. It is to say that even if we are not sure that this particular event will take place, we have gained enough knowledge of the pertinent entities — enough evidence — for us to make an educated guess that they possess the necessary attributes that would enable them to contribute to the occurrence of this event.

Here is how humans actually arrived at the concept of possibility. Nature has many attributes that we understand at least on a general level. When we say a particular outcome is possible but not certain, what is uncertain is a specific outcome. The specificity of it is crucial to our discussion. Should you roll a conventional six-sided die 🎲, it is uncertain whether you will roll a 1 instead of a 6. However, from our knowledge of what is certain on the more-general level, we do know that the possible outcomes fall within a set of particular parameters that is substantiated by evidence, often substantiated to the point where the parameters themselves are certain.

That we know it’s specifically uncertain whether the roll will result in a 1 or a 6 is based on our observation-based general certainty of the conventional six-sided die’s attributes. It is certain that the respective faces of the conventional six-sided die 🎲 are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. This certain knowledge of reality’s attributes is the actual basis for the theoretic possibilities to contemplate. Based on reality’s attributes, it is theoretically possible that we may roll a 1 or a 6. By the same token, it is not theoretically possible for this conventional six-sided die to land on Infinity or 3.14 even if we imagine it.

Rather than any arbitrary postulation that can be imagined, “possibility” refers to uncertainty over a specific outcome among other specific outcomes that can result. And even when the specific outcome is uncertain, sensory evidence has given us enough general knowledge to be confident about the range that those specific still-uncertain outcomes fall within. And at the center of that general range is evidence for which we can be rationally certain. “Possibility”-and-“uncertainty” over something specific still presupposes a more-generalized certain knowledge about it.

By contrast, when someone floats an arbitrary postulate, such as that astrology predicts the future, often this person issues a particular challenge and advances a particular insinuation. The challenge is for any would-be doubter to put forth an effort to disprove the postulate completely. The insinuation is that, in the absence of such an effort, those who initially doubted the postulate must now concede that the postulate has gained clearance for admission into consideration as a theoretic possibility. Anyone who refrains from entertaining the postulate as deserving of consideration — even if that refraining was originally by passive default — is allegedly duty-bound to engage with arguments for and against the arbitrary postulate, on the pain of otherwise being exposed as intellectually lazy and intellectually dishonest.

It is that challenge and insinuation that are intellectually lazy and intellectually dishonest. There is no limit to the number of arbitrary postulates being foisted in our culture. Anyone who tried to engage with all or even most of them would waste all time on this pursuit, and partake in nothing else in life. On any occasion in which someone floats an arbitrary postulate, it is not incumbent upon me to poke holes in it to justify my passively refraining from entertaining that postulate as a possibility. When someone wants me to welcome the postulate as a theoretic possibility, the burden is on him or her to show evidence for the existence of conditions that can contribute to its occurrence. Thus, we do not rule out possibilities from limitless arbitrary imaginings. Instead we rule in possibilities based on their evidentiary support. 

There is only one set of circumstances in which we have a firm footing in ruling out what was previously considered a possibility. It is this. Initially, based on the knowledge we have, we rule in a set of theoretic possibilities, such as A, B, and C.  Then we conduct further investigation. Based on the additional knowledge, A and B still appear viable. However, the new information we have gained about the attributes of the pertinent entities exist in such a manner as to preclude C from happening. At that juncture, we can rule out C.  But insofar as any proposition is made in the absence of evidence, that proposition is not to be ruled either in or out as a possibility. It deserves simply to be ignored so that we can devote our precious time and attention instead to propositions that are buttressed by evidence.

That is why it is inappropriate — why it is the Primacy of Consciousness — when people start with some arbitrary imagining, call it “theoretically possible,” and then try to rationalize it after-the-fact. To understand the Primacy of Existence is to start with observations and facts. And it is after we learn about an entity’s capabilities that way, when we can apply imagination to imagine possibilities in such a manner that can actually get practical results.

Yes, even when an outcome is uncertain but possible, all the possibilities fall within a particular range. When experts dismiss a possibility as impossible only for it to come true, it is because they misjudged the edges or boundaries of that range. We will shortly get to a case study in that. When experts’ proclamations about the possibility or impossibility of an outcome are proven wrong, their misjudgment over the boundaries of the range in possibilities does not vindicate the presumption that arbitrary postulation imagined may fall within the range of possibilities.

And it is through sensory-based data-gathering that we learn about what does and does not fall within the range of theoretic possibilities. By gathering more data for the senses to observe, we can properly revise our understanding of where are the outermost edges of that range in possibilities. Yes, what we consider possible or impossible can be rightly revised, but those revisions are always based on the evidence of the senses. That is an essential point when it comes to the Wright brothers and the experts who, in hindsight, were unwise to ridicule them.

 

 

 

What About People Who Accomplish What Was Previously Thought Impossible?
The invention of airplanes provides an instructive case study in ascertaining what is and is not possible, and in imagination’s proper role in rendering such judgments. The Wright brothers were highly imaginative. They conceived of a heavier-than-air flying machine at a time when none had existed and in which the consensus was that such a product of their efforts would never take off — pun intended.

“We knew,” said Wilbur, the older Wright brother, “that men had by common consent adopted human flight as the standard of impossibility. When a man said, ‘It can’t be done; a man might as well try to fly,’ he was understood as expressing the final limit of impossibility.”

It was for such reasons that the prospect that the Wrights would succeed at flying was widely dismissed. It was dismissed even by the eminent physicist and entrepreneur Lord Kelvin, who played a major role in laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable and who provides the namesake of the scientific unit for measuring temperature. “...I have not the smallest molecule of faith,” he wrote, “in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of expectation of good results from any of the [aeroplane] trials we hear of.” 

In 1899, Scientific American magazine, too, expressed doubt. A major obstacle to the invention of the airplane was developing a method for safe steering. As the ability to duplicate the method by which birds steered themselves seemed unlikely, the periodical determined that aeroplanes would not have “commercial or military utility.”

In light of a spectacular failure of another experimenter, Samuel Pierpont Langley, attempting heavier-than-air flight, the New York Times pronounced in October 1903 that though such manned flight could happen one day in a far-flung future, it would not happen any time soon. “It might be assumed,” said the Times

that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years...

That same year, on December 10, a second New York Times editorial stated that such a brilliant enthusiast attempting flight should not

put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time and money for further airship experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can expected to result from trying to fly...

A week later, the Wright brothers made their first flight.

To the dismissals in general, the younger Wright brother, Orville, retorted, “If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.”

Of course, in their endeavor to prove it possible for humans to produce heavier-than-air flying machines, imagination was necessary but not sufficient. For what they imagined to manifest as possible, the Wright brothers always had to account for the evidentiary facts of Nature they observed. The reason why the Wright brothers were right. whereas Lord Kelvin and Scientific American magazine and the New York Times were wrong, was that when it came to this issue, the Wright brothers took all the pertinent evidence into consideration much more logically and consistently than did Lord Kelvin, Scientific American, and the New York Times.

What the Wright brothers understood to be “theoretically possible,” at least implicitly, was (a) what they imagined and (b) what they understood to be within the at-least-general bounds of evidence.

Here is a story that is an example of that. To make their first tests on the wings of their contraption, they produced a large kite — the “glider.” The first airplane would have a motor, but, as far as their early experiments were concerned, the glider did not need one. They took the then-motorless glider to Kitty Hawk exactly because its strong winds would carry the glider. In these experiments, they initially relied on “lift tables” provided by another aviation experimenter, Otto Lilienthal.

Lilienthal had experimented on using different shapes for his airfoils — objects to sustain lift in flight, such as wings and tail rudders. The tables were the records he made for the lift-to-drag ratio for each of the various airfoil shapes. Eventually, the Wright brothers noticed major discrepancies between Lilienthal’s lift tables versus their own results. Rather than take Lilienthal’s lift tables on faith, the brothers had to admit to themselves that the tables were inaccurate. They therefore had to apply both their imaginations and empirical knowledge to develop their own lift tables.

Their bicycle shop proved fortuitous in this. They built their own small wind tunnel out of wood. A 1-horsepower engine from their bike shop powered a fan that produced airflow. Out of bicycle spokes and hacksaws, they assembled a “lift balance.” Mounted on top of the lift balance would be (1) an airfoil section they intended to test and (2) a flat plate with a surface area equal to that of the airfoil section. As the airflow impacted upon them, the respective torques of the airfoil section and the equivalent-surface-area flat-plate had to be equal to one another. When the respective torques were equal, the Wrights were able to make accurate measurements of lift-to-drag ratio for 48 different airfoil sections.

Observe the need for both logic and imagination even in just these wind-tunnel experiments. The Wrights had to be logical in accepting the faultiness of Lilienthal’s lift tables. They had to be imaginative in devising their own wind-tunnel experiments. And they needed both imagination and logic to understand how this wind-tunnel model would apply to the actual airplane’s flight later on. This smaller part, and the wider project overall, required both logic and imagination.

It was through such empirical observation that the Wright brothers gained further confidence that the flight of an airplane was indeed possible. Orville said, “I believe we possessed more data on cambered surfaces, a hundred times over, than all of our predecessors put together.” Note his mention of data — as in “sensory evidence.” The data came first — and, from it, the Wrights could ascertain what was, and what was not, theoretically possible. Here, we see that, although “theoretic possibility” is permeated with many still-unknowns, it remains within parameters set tentatively by what is known, including that which is recently-discovered.

Four years before the first flight, Wilbur Wright wrote to the Smithsonian Institution asking for information on what had already been tried. His letter touched implicitly upon the basis in evidentiary support for any theoretic possibility. “I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine. I wish to avail myself of all that is already known and then if possible add my mite [own information-gathering]...”

Yes, de facto, the Wright brothers’ approach was Facts come first; then we apply those facts to revise our understanding of which of our imaginings fall within the range of actual theoretic possibilities.

 As my late father wrote on January 19, 1973, “An idea is not a reality. An idea is a method of perceiving reality.”

It is true that imagination is important. I even argue that imagination is imperative to logic itself. Any time you recognize a causal relationship — where you recognize that if C happens rather than D it will result in E and not F — you are using imagination. In any instance where you consider future consequences to any action, that is imagination at work. When you read a noun and understand the literal entity that the noun denotes, that understanding, too, involves a form of visualization — that is, imagination. Reasoning cannot take place in the absence of this faculty.

In contrast to William Blake proclaiming that the idiot Reasoner laughs at the Man of Imagination was L. Frank Baum, creator of the Wizard of Oz franchise. Baum understood, at least partially on some implicit level, the need for both imagination and logic. In the preface to his book The Lost Prisoner of Oz, he pointed out,

Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. ... Imagination led [Benjamin] Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities.

And, in accordance with the case study I provided in this essay, to Baum’s litany of developments we can add the Wright brothers and their airplane.

I can be killed by something I eat — I might choke or be poisoned. But the fact remains that eating is for survival. Likewise, although this essay is about how people often use their imaginations to indulge in arbitrary falsehoods, imagination is ultimately the tool for adhering to reality. That is what the Wright brothers teach us.

Yes. Imagination is all about reality. That is provided that one remembers that imagination is necessary but not sufficient for discerning which scenarios count as scenarios of possibility.

The reason why Lord Kelvin, Scientific American magazine, and the New York Times were wrong in dismissing the possibility of heavier-than-air flying machines being invented by 1903 was that they misjudged the location of the outermost edges of the range of possibilities. This does not mean that anything imagined deserves to be entertained as being within the range of possibilities. Rather, through their additional sensory-based data-gathering, the Wright brothers were the party that had earned a much-more-solid understanding than did these other parties of where the range of possibilities lay.

The farther we get to the edge of the range of possibilities, the more we find that though we have evidence, the evidence being less plentiful or strong renders the possibility to be one of less confidence until we have additional evidence. And insofar as there is more to learn, the edges of the range of possibility may be fuzzy. But the closer we get to the center of the range of possibilities, the more we can be certain of propositions as they have an abundance of evidence has thoroughly substantiated them.

I have made a diagram to explain this. I apologize that this thumbnail image of it is blurry. You can click on it for a clearer image of the text.    

For a further exploration of where imagination can and does help understand what happens in reality literally, you can read my follow-up essay “Good Fiction Is the Truth” over here.

The Fallacies in Saying “Maybe Our Sensory Experiences Are a Distortion of Reality, and We Are Ignorant of What Is Actual Reality”
I now want to give special attention to the arbitrary postulate that perhaps everything our senses tell us is a misleading distortion, and that there may be a truer reality that exists beyond our ability to perceive anything. According to this postulate, what our senses inform us is not reality but merely a representation of reality — or, more precisely, a misrepresentation of reality. This postulate is an obfuscation of the very means by which we identify what is a representation or misrepresentation of anything.

To say that R is a representation of Q is to say that R is not literally Q but that R at least symbolizes Q in our minds. Moreover, we know R is a representation of Q because it has enough pertinent similarities in attributes with Q for us to recognize R as representational of it. For instance, we know that a toy truck from the brand Hot Wheels or Micro Machines is not literally a truck. But a toy truck from Hot Wheels or Micro Machines provides enough visual and other sensory cues for us to recognize the toy as a representation of a truck.

Here is a pertinent question. If you present a toy truck to a baby before she has ever seen a real truck, will she recognize the toy as a representation of a truck? She will not. You can recognize R as a representation or simulation of Q no more than the extent to which you have knowledge of what Q itself is like literally.

The same principle applies when we talk of a misrepresentation, or at least a representation that has been found to be inaccurate. Consider how whales are depicted on maps of the Atlantic Ocean that were drawn during the high Middle Ages. Of importance here are some facts about whales that became well-known in the twentieth century. First, whales do not possess scales like those of carp — goldfishes and koi — and the arowana fish. Also pertinent are tail flukes — these are the triangle-shaped parts of the tail fin found on fishes and whales. On whales, the tail flukes are horizontal — there is a fluke on the left and another on the right. By contrast, when a fish has tail flukes, they are more likely to be vertical — there is a fluke on the top of the tail and maybe another on the bottom. Not all fishes have vertical tail flukes, but it is the case that all whales only have horizontal tail flukes.

Now take a gander at a medieval map of the Earth and its oceans, and examine what that map labels a whale. Conventionally, the “whale” will be covered in fishlike scales and sport tail flukes that are vertical like a fish’s, not horizontal. These are inaccuracies in representation. The charitable way to interpret this is that the map’s illustrators labored in earnest and the inaccuracies came from their not having the information about whales that became more accessible from the twentieth century onward. But whatever the cause of the inaccuracies, we know of the representation’s inaccuracies only because we have some knowledge of what actual whales are like.

 

 Thus we discern the illogic in someone saying that all our sensory experiences are no more than a representation of reality, whereas the truer reality is unknown to us. We can discern something as a representation of objective reality no more than the extent to which we have already experienced objective reality directly and thereby gained knowledge of it.

Further, we can discern the even-bigger fallacy in proclaiming that our sensory experiences might be a false representation of an alleged truer objective reality that remains unknown. For us to have a basis in speculating that our sensory experiences might not match reality exactly, once again we would have to know what objective reality is like literally. And yet in this scenario we have already been told that we are wholly ignorant of that very same objective reality.

 

 
Conclusion
When someone proclaims, “It’s theoretically possible that all our sensory experiences are deceptive or unreal, and we are in complete ignorance of reality as it truly is,” that proclamation remains wholly arbitrary. And it is to be written off as such.

In sum, the existence of entities and the facts associated with them are primary, and to discern what is theoretically possible for those entities is contingent upon those facts. That is why, just because you can imagine something happening, that is not sufficient for calling it a “theoretic possibility.”

On Friday, August 4, 2023, I added the part about Scientific American magazine. On Monday, August 7, 2023, I added the paragraph about how, subsequent to ruling in a theoretic possibility with the evidence we had at the time, C, we are justified in ruling out C as a possibility upon our discovering further evidence that precludes it. That same day I embedded the YouTube video about how many animals were represented inaccurately in the European-authored bestiaries of the high Middle Ages. On Sunday, June 2, 2024, I added the quotation from my father. On Saturday, September 7, 2024, I added the case study of what the Wright brothers did about the lift tables. The sentences where I use the word literally were added on Friday, December 27, 2024. On Monday, December 30, 2024, I added the sentences about how imagination is actually a tool for living in reality, provided that one continues to adhere to the rules of logic.  On Sunday, June 29, 2025, I added the passages about William Blake. On Wednesday, January 7, 2026, I added the quotation and observation by L. Frank Baum. On that same day I added the point about how the concepts of “possibility” and “uncertainty” over something specific still presuppose a more-generalized certain knowledge about it. Also on that day I added the diagram to explain how the presence of evidence is what separates which propositions do deserve to be considered as theoretic possibilities from those propositions which do not. on Thursday, January 22, 2026, I added the quotation from David Hume about how human beings cannot defend reason using reason.

Principled Free-Marketers Vs. Fiscal Tightwads: Assumed to Be the Same Because They Want 'Cuts in Tax Funding' But They're Fundamentally Different

Stuart K. Hayashi


There are two types of people generally considered to be part of the political Right -- especially in the United States -- who are thought of as being in the same category. This is due to a superficial similarity. Yet they are fundamentally different in philosophy. This is not a mere difference in degree that many on the Left assume it to be. It is a difference in kind.

The two types are thought to be in the category of: mean-spirited right-winger who wants to cut tax funding to government programs.

Here, there are two wholly different groups of people who are slapped together into this package deal: principled free-marketers versus fiscal tightwads.


The Free Market Is Necessarily Ideological -- And That’s Good
A genuine free-marketer is a principled ideologist -- what normally gets denigrated as an ideologue. In fact, Napoleon Bonaparte coined the term ideologue to disparage free-marketers who opposed him, namely the Enlightenment philosophe Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy. Tracy described his own philosophic approach as ideology, and there was nothing pejorative about it. It meant “the science of ideas.” Napoleon was the first to say that if you had a philosophy based on consistently applicable principles, it meant you were just some fanatic applying dogma deduced from arbitrary premises. The next big historical figure to attach derisive connotations to ideology was Karl Marx, of all people.


Principled Free-Marketers
Anyhow, the principled free-marketer has a specific endgame in mind: he wants a government limited only to retaliating to the initiation of the use of physical force, which means that the government’s duties are limited mostly to the police, military, and the courts. There might also be some government functions limited to helping people define private property rights as new technologies are developed. Rather than Herbert Hoover’s approach with the FCC, for instance, a principled free-market government would have helped define private property rights with respect to which party owned which part of the electromagnetic spectrum at which to broadcast. A free-market government would also help define intellectual property rights clearly, such as in the case of the U.S. Department of Agriculture recognizing intellectual property in sexually produced plants with Plant Variety Protections. (And no, abolishing intellectual property rights is not the true freedom position, but that’s a topic I have tackled elsewhere.)

The principled free-marketer’s endgame is the sort of constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State that Auberon Herbert championed. Principled free-marketers care staunchly about this because they comprehend that “taxation is theft” is not mere political rhetoric or hyperbole; it is literally true, and therefore they want to do what it takes to minimize such violent threats. In the end, to achieve this minimization requires a constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State.

Principled free-marketers understand, though, that there is no way to achieve this overnight. Contrary to what some people might fantasize about, there will be no disaster that allows us to wipe the slate clean and start over with a constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman utopia (the notion that principled free-marketers would rejoice at this prospect is one of Naomi Klein’s many delusions). But though we cannot obtain this dream overnight, we use this end goal as a standard by which we measure our progress. We know that we cannot privatize Social Security in the course of a day, but, because we have a good idea of what perfection looks like, we know that legislation that expands Social Security is bad, whereas legislation is good if it respects the liabilities owed to elderly people who already paid into the system while the legislation simultaneously allowing young workers to opt out and seek private retirement accounts.

Principled free-marketers do make moral judgments but they recognize that, in peacetime, there is no good reason for the law to discriminate against people based on arbitrary distinctions. They understand that if it is wrong to pay tax money to the foreign-born for their health care, then it is no better to pay tax money to the native-born for their health care.

Principled free-marketers very much want to cut government funding for many services that people now believe, mistakenly, can only be provided by the government. For instance, principled free-marketers say that there should not be tax-funded municipal libraries. At this, many people react in horror; their assumption is that if the municipal government does not use tax money to maintain libraries, there will be no public libraries. To this, principled free-marketers point out that public libraries were actually invented by private entrepreneurs like Benjamin Franklin. What happened was that a group of people pooled their money together to purchase many books and store the books in one location. If you paid a periodic fee, you could check out books when you wished.

Principled free-marketers also point out how private entrepreneurs invented firefighting departments, and of how it was not due to the inadequacy of privatization, but of changes in liability laws that misunderstood property rights, that eventually misled officials to conclude that firefighting could be done adequately only by municipal governments. In any case, whereas the straw-man depiction of principled free-marketers is of those trying to leave you in the jungle, bereft of libraries and roads and schools, the principled free-marketers simply point out that any enterprise that can succeed in the absence of threatening violence can succeed in the absence of direct government involvement. Principled free-marketers thus explain that private individuals, peaceably cooperating on their own accord, can provide public goods that are falsely assumed to be the rightful exclusive province of the State.

That is a very different approach to that of the fiscal tightwads with which the principled free-marketers are lumped.


Fiscal Tightwads
Whatever lip service fiscal tightwads might give to the rhetoric of principled free-marketers like Ayn Rand and Auberon Herbert, the fiscal tightwads agree with welfare-state leftists, at least on an implicit level, that all assets that exist actually rightfully belong to “Society as a Whole,” and that the objects you believe to be your absolute private property are merely objects you are borrowing from  "society." They therefore hold no qualms about the welfare state in principle. They have other reasons for wanting to reduce tax funding for various government services.

Unlike many of their more radical, more explicitly left-wing counterparts, the fiscal tightwads recognize that there is necessarily a limit to how much wealth the government can spend. The fiscal tightwads, unlike those farther to the political Left, understand that government coffers can run out. Therefore, when the government is heading toward bankruptcy, the fiscal tightwads sound the alarm and say, “Yes, as painful as it is to admit, we have to make cuts.” Mind you that the fiscal tightwads do not acknowledge that this tax spending is wrong in principle -- they do not cohere, deep down, that taxation is theft. Instead, they believe that the government has merely gone overboard in spending tax money on the welfare state, and therefore the government should exercise more restraint in the spending -- so that there will still be some units of tax money left over to spend in the long-term future. That is, they do not disapprove morally of tax spending on supposedly peaceful enterprises -- they merely think that the government should be more conservative in how it disperses the tax money, another reason why the word conservative is associated with cuts in tax spending. They believe that being conservative with tax spending is the way to be a responsible steward of what is the collective heritage rightfully collectively belonging to society.

Moreover, fiscal tightwads are similar to the radical Left in wanting to apply the altruistic ethic, but they have a different interpretation of how this should be applied. Fiscal tightwads believe in the Puritans’ application of altruism.


How the Far Left and the Fiscal Tightwads Try to Impose Altruism Differently
Suppose that you are wealthy and I am not; I am needy. The radical Left says that morality requires that the State takes that money from you by force and then gives it to me. Then the radical Left tells you that you, as a rich person, ought to accept that. Your accepting that would be a most unselfish and therefore moral gesture; your acceptance of this policy would help you be honorable by practicing the virtue of self-sacrifice. If you, as a rich person, balk at this, you commit the sin of selfishness.

By contrast, the fiscal tightwads flip this around, accusing the other side of being too selfish. In a more Puritanical sort of tradition, the fiscal tightwads believe that virtue is found in suffering from privation. They believe that if I go through a period of material want and get through it, learning to scrimp by on scraps, that builds character. Therefore, if I ask the State to take money from a rich person like you and give it to me, I am the one being selfish.

As an example, Lawrence W. Reed of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) told John Stossel that in the Bible, Luke 12: 13–15, Jesus reproached a man for desiring coercive wealth redistribution for being selfish: "And one of the company said unto him, Master [Jesus], speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me. And He [Jesus] said unto him, Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you? And He [Jesus] said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." Jesus even goes as far as declaring to anyone desirous of wealth redistribution, "And He [Jesus] said unto His disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on. [ . . . ] And seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind" (Luke 12: 22–29).

Indeed, say the fiscal tightwads, if the government provides for everyone in poverty so that people are no longer in poverty, that makes them decadent and spoiled and soft and lazy -- all these material comforts are manifestations of the selfishness of the persons receiving these benefits. If I receive these amenities from the State, the State is depriving me of the opportunity to practice the virtue of . . . austerity.  This idea is the reason why, when European governments finally began to cut funding for services that never should have received tax funding in the first place, these measures were given the misleading label of austerity -- the assumption being that you will necessarily be poor and Spartan simply if you don’t have the State giving you stuff.


Why Fiscal Tightwads Are Nonobjective About What Needs Cutting
Thus, we find that one major reason why the fiscal tightwads want to reduce funding for various government programs is that they think “too much money” in general is spent by the State. They also object that the State spends tax money on particular enterprises rather than others. For example, when he was mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani expressed outrage that tax money was spent on such a hideous and offensive and sacrilegious artwork as “Holy Virgin Mary.” However, he had no objection to the idea of tax money being spent on what he deemed genuinely tasteful and inoffensive (maybe even beautiful) art, such as, say, a more Grecian-style depiction of idealized naked human bodies. Fiscal tightwads will often wail that too much tax money is dispersed to highly unionized government schools and not enough to charter schools that have more autonomy from the unions.

Thus, the fiscal tightwads say (1) that “too much tax money is spent” in general and (2) that “too much tax money is spent” on unworthy social services instead of on worthy social services. They do not give a lot of thought to the considerations (A) the very institution of compulsory taxation is at least as morally problematic as any other form of extortion, or (B) that the institution of private property should be recognized as consistent, an absolute, which means that when it comes to anything other than defense against violence, there is no “common good” that justifies pooling everyone’s money together and deeming it public property. Note that because they do not have a well-thought-out principle in mind, they have no objective definition for what constitutes “too much spending.”

They have no objective criterion for saying that, say, federal welfare spending as 14 percent of GDP is too much whereas federal welfare spending as 0.014 percent of GDP is ideal. Nor they do have objective criteria for judging which nonviolent enterprises are deserving of tax funding and which are not. Fiscal tightwads have no qualms about how Dick Cheney’s wife had a job at the National Endowment for the Humanities transferring funds to relatively inoffensive art; they only squawk at sacrilegious material. The idea that everyone should be free to keep her own money or spend it on whatever art she likes -- beautiful or ugly, sacrilegious or not -- is hardly a consideration; that is more a concern of ideologues in the principled free-marketer camp. It is also the fiscal tightwads who keep saying that immigration should be curbed because immigrants getting taxpayer funding deprives citizens who are native-born -- and somehow therefore necessarily more deserving -- of that same tax funding. Such people are not objecting to the taxpayer funding on principle, and the New York Times is right to refer to this rather arbitrary distinction as “welfare chauvinism.”

Principled free-marketers and fiscal tightwads both talk about how they want tax expenditures reduced, and therefore the Left assumes they are all the same, and that differences between these people are differences merely in degree. They think of Ayn Rand as simply a more extreme version of Robert Taft. Indeed, almost every famous politician of the twentieth century who has been denounced as a laissez-faireist ideologue was merely a fiscal tightwad who finagled with the left-wing radicals over how national tax spending should be increased only by 7 percent and not 30 percent. Definitely we principled free-marketers consider a spending increase of 7 percent to be less severe than that of 30 percent, but it does not follow that we are actually in fundamental philosophic agreement with the fiscal tightwads. Probably the twentieth-century president who was most consistent in reducing spending was Calvin Coolidge, but he, too, was a fiscal tightwad who simply was more effective at being tight-waddish than all other U.S. Presidents of the twentieth century, especially Ronald Reagan; he was actually a Progressive who voiced mitigated support for the regulatory-entitlement state policies that Theodore Roosevelt championed.

Ever since Ayn Rand became well-known, some people have seemed to overlap in the two categories. Some people call themselves libertarians for natural rights and yet they fall back on saying the State should curb immigration so that tax money will focus on native-born citizens instead of on immigrants. What category a person is in is determined more by his actions than by any vague lip service he gives to natural rights. If someone claims to agree with Ayn Rand and Auberon Herbert but then falls back on “welfare chauvinist” talking points about native-born citizens deserving the tax spending that would otherwise go to grubby immigrants, that person is not being a principled free-marketer in this capacity.

Of special note are the "libertarians"(?) who say that a universal guaranteed [sic] minimum income, paid for through tax money, should "replace [sic] the welfare state." To say that a guaranteed income "replaces" welfare is disingenuous; a taxpayer-funded guaranteed income is welfare. What these libertarians mean, though, is that they would favor having a guaranteed income instituted if it meant that the other presently existing welfare programs, such as Social Security, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), be repealed.  They proclaim that the advantage of this is that it would result in a net reduction in taxation and government spending.

A net reduction in spending, by itself, would not be objectionable, but principled free-marketers are far from impressed by these libertarians' (?) concession to the Left's assumption that everyone's money is ultimately public property and that every possession in your custody is merely a gift from the social collective.  Those who say that the guaranteed income is somehow fiscally responsible simply because it would waste less money than do other welfare programs, are definitely not principled free-marketers.  That position is, at best, more in line with that of the fiscal tightwads (and even to put such advocates in that classification is to be generous).


They All Just Want to Cut Tax Funding? The Difference
Here is the difference. Fiscal tightwads want a cut in taxpayer spending for the following reasons:

• Taxes are annoying
• Taxes disincentivize economic productivity, which will result in a net loss in economic productivity for society as a whole
• Taxpayer funding makes you decadent and lazy and therefore selfish, depriving you of the opportunity to undergo some humbling privation and learn the virtues of unselfish austerity
• Too much spending will drain the coffers and there will be no tax money left to spend in the long run
• This tax money is going to something morally debased when it should go to a loftier state-sponsored enterprise

This is the principled free-marketer’s concern:

• Morality requires that you be free to live peaceably without other people threatening violence to control you. Government spending involves compulsory taxation, and compulsory taxation is a form of extortion and violent control over you, as violence on the part of the State is the recrimination against you if you do not hand over your wealth. Compulsory taxation therefore ought to be driven to the minimum. Period.

On January 17, 2017, I added to this post the mention of Lawrence Reed's citation of verses from Luke 12 in the Bible.