In this short essay, the author develops the argument that in an age of rapid change, history provides poor guidelines, and imagination is the way to outline potential futures and provide a choice for action. He goes on to provide a classification of truths into categories including scientific truth, literary truth, and imaginary truth, among others. Imaginary truth is defined as the likelihood that a given scenario could occur, given a believable set of assumptions and our understanding of human nature. Each kind of truth can be thought of on a scale between hard truth and soft truth, where the hard side represents near certainty, and the soft side represents some degree of belief. At the end of the continuum is "absolute uncertainty."

To me, the author's arguments carry little conviction. Too little account is taken of the way imagination is grounded in past experience. The author starts with the aphorism, reputedly from McLuhan: "Studying the past to understand the future is like driving a car by looking in the rear mirror." I could finish with another aphorism: "Understanding the future without studying the past is like jumping into an abyss wearing a blindfold."