The Ambiguist (or, What Comes After Science Fiction?) (opens in new tab)

In a recent post called “Alien Politics” I introduced the idea of abeyance. Here I’m going to expand on that by talking about what kind of person does abeyance, and what kind of institution might practice it. Abeyance is the conscious refusal to decide that you understand something too soon. This is hard to do, because at the very least, we are expected to have an opinion on everything; for many of us, our jobs require us to be able to authoritatively state what we know, and deploy that knowl...