How Plausibility Shapes the Futures We Can Imagine

Most discussions about the future revolve around probability, possibility, and desirability. Which future is most likely? Which is possible? Which do we want? These are useful categories. But they rest on an assumption that usually goes unexamined: that we already know the full range of futures worth considering.

We don’t. And the reason lies in plausibility.

Nele Fischer and Sascha Dannenberg’s 2021 paper ‘The Social Construction of Futures’ is, for me, one of the key documents of Critical Futures Studies. It makes visible what most futures work takes for granted: that the futures we can even imagine are pre-filtered by what we consider plausible. And what we consider plausible is not objective. It is constructed.

Plausibility is not a neutral filter

Within futures studies, plausibility is generally understood as coherence with prior knowledge. A plausible future is one that “makes sense” given what we know. It aligns with our experience, our education, our cultural context. Fischer and Dannenberg draw on Roland Barthes‘ concept of doxa to name what this really is: the layer of naturalized assumptions that we experience as common sense, as simply “the way things are.”¹

This matters because doxa is invisible to those who hold it. We don’t experience our thought frame as a frame, we experience it as the way things simply are. And from that unquestioned ground, we project futures. The concept is closely related to future imaginaries: doxa shapes the present from which we imagine the future, and the dominant futures we imagine in turn stabilize the doxa. Two sides of the same mechanism. The frame is social, not individual. It is shared across organizations, industries, and societies. It is culturally, socially, and ideologically pre-shaped.

Plausibility comes before everything else

Here is the paper’s sharpest insight: plausibility judgments do not sit alongside probability, possibility, and desirability. They precede and prefigure them.²

Think about that for a moment. Before we assess whether a future is probable, before we ask whether it is possible, before we decide whether it is desirable, we have already filtered it through our plausibility frame. If something doesn’t pass that filter, it never enters the conversation. It doesn’t appear in any scenario, any strategy document, any public debate. Not because it’s impossible, but because it’s unthinkable within the current frame.

Fischer and Dannenberg illustrate this with a diagram (Fig. 1 in the paper): the familiar futures cone, but with plausibility drawn as a boundary layer that wraps around the entire space of considered futures. Everything outside that layer is invisible. Not rejected, not debated. Simply absent.

This is a different claim than saying “we should consider more futures.” It says: the mechanism that decides which futures we can consider is itself constructed, and we rarely examine it.

Shifting the standpoint

If plausibility is constructed from our current understanding of the present, then changing that understanding changes which futures become thinkable. This is the move that Critical Futures Studies makes, and it’s where Fischer and Dannenberg’s framework becomes practical.

Their second diagram (Fig. 2) shows what happens when the present is perceived as contingent, as something that could be otherwise. Futures that were implausible under the dominant frame become plausible when viewed from a reframed present. So the cone gets wider, yes, but for a different reason than classical futures work would suggest: the starting point in the present has moved.

Fischer calls this “disrupting the thought frame” (Denkrahmen stören). The point is to recognize that a frame exists at all, and to develop the capacity to shift it deliberately.

The paper proposes a semiotic approach for doing this: examining the actors, the argumentative structure, and the knowledge base embedded in any image of the future. Who is mentioned? Who is implied? Who is absent? What causal chains are assumed? What knowledge is taken for granted? Through these questions, the otherwise invisible plausibility of a future becomes remarkable, in Barthes’ sense: something worth remarking on, something that can be examined and, potentially, reframed.³

What this opens up

What stays with me about this framework is that it gives you something to actually do. If plausibility is constructed, it can be de-constructed. And once you start de-constructing it, other present futures become accessible, ones that were always there but couldn’t pass through the filter.

But there is a catch. Plausibility doesn’t filter once and then step aside. The futures we consider plausible shape our actions, and our actions shape the present, which in turn reinforces what counts as plausible. This is where Fischer and Dannenberg’s framework connects to the performativity of future imaginaries: dominant futures actively maintain the thought frame that produced them. Disrupting plausibility, then, is an ongoing practice against the gravitational pull of the familiar.