What it is
Concluding that something is false because you cannot imagine how it could be true.
In the wild
I cannot see how it works, so it cannot.
How to answer it
Note that the limit is on the imagination, not on the world.
Burden and ignorance
Argument from incredulity
Also called Personal incredulity, divine fallacy
In depth
Origin and naming
Also called the argument from personal incredulity and, in Robert T. Carroll's Skeptic's Dictionary, the 'divine fallacy' — the leap from unexplained to supernatural. The pattern is ancient: early peoples who could not explain thunder attributed it to a god's rage. The modern name makes the error exact: the limit is in the imagining, not in the world.
More places it shows up
I can't imagine a bacterium surviving in boiling acid, so that study can't be right.
The merger numbers don't make sense to me after one read, so the analyst must be cooking the books.
I can't picture how this building would survive an earthquake with columns that thin. The architects are gambling with lives.
Evolution says a fish turned into a bird? I just can't see it, so scratch the whole theory.
How to spot it
- Notice when disbelief itself is offered as the sole ground for rejection.
- Notice when the speaker substitutes a hard-to-picture image for an actual mechanism.
- Notice when the demand for an explanation arrives after the verdict, not before it.