Concept
Counterfactual conditional
Overview
Counterfactual conditionals (also contrafactual/subjunctive/X-marked conditionals) are conditional sentences that describe what would have been true if circumstances had been different, typically when the antecedent is taken to be false or incompatible with what actually happened. In English they are often formed with a past or irrealis morphology, as in "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here", and are standardly contrasted with indicative conditionals, which are generally used to discuss live or open possibilities.
The name subjunctive conditionals is sometimes preferred because counterfactuals are not always "contrary to fact" as the word "counterfactual" implies, but the name counterfactual conditionals is sometimes preferred because counterfactuals are not always grammatically subjunctive. Hence the name X-marking has been developed as a compromise, although it is newer in the literature; see § Terminology.
Counterfactuals are central topics in philosophical logic, formal semantics, and philosophy of language. In particular, several conditional logics have been developed specifically to study counterfactuals. Early work treated them as a challenge for the analysis of conditionals in terms of the material conditional, which would make all counterfactuals with false antecedents trivially true. Subsequent research developed a range of non-truth-functional accounts, especially possible world approaches such as David Lewis's variably strict analysis and Stalnaker's closest-world semantics, as well as alternatives based on strict conditionals, causal models, and belief revision and the Ramsey test.
From a linguistic perspective, counterfactuality is closely tied to the grammatical marking of tense, aspect, and mood. Many languages use so-called fake tense and fake aspect to signal a counterfactual interpretation, sometimes analyzed as instances of more general X-marking that distinguishes these conditionals from their indicative or O-marked counterparts. Research in psychology and cognitive science studies how people understand and reason with counterfactual conditionals, how they differ from indicatives in comprehension and inference, and how they relate to more general patterns of counterfactual thinking and mental simulation.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Obj. 2: Further, whatever is true, is true by reason of truth. If, then, truth is only in the intellect, nothing will be true except in so far as it is understood. But this is the error of the ancient philosophers, who said that whatever seems to be true is so. Consequently mutual contradictories seem to be true as seen by different persons at the same time. Obj. 3: Further, "that, on account of which a thing is so…
Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I
States what Counterfactual conditional is.
Examples of the latter are: 'The mind is no elephant:' 'A lion is no table;' propositions which are correct but absurd, exactly like the identical propositions: 'A lion is a lion;' 'Mind is mind.' Propositions like these are undoubtedly the truth of the immediate, or, as it is called, Qualitative judgment. But they are not judgments at all, and can only occur in a subjective thought where even an untrue abstraction…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Counterfactual conditional is.
people who think that argumentation ever consists of one part alone they will be able to say that it is often sufficient to carry-on an argumentation in this way.--"Since she has had a child, she has lain with a man." For they say that this assertion requires no proof, nor assumption, nor proof of an assumption, nor summing up. But it seems to us that they are misled by the ambiguity of the name. For argumentation…
Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4
States what Counterfactual conditional is.
Philosophers who discussed Counterfactual conditional
Related ideas
- Nelson Goodman
- Grammatical tense
- Hebrew language
- Intension
- Julius Caesar
- Counterfactual thinking
- Law of excluded middle
- Axiomatic system
- Morpheme
- Modus ponens
- Modus tollens
- Minimal pair
- Psychology
- Polish language
- Grammatical mood
- Denotation
- Russian language
- Philosophical logic
- Modal logic
- Willard Van Orman Quine
- Accessibility relation
- Logical consequence
- David Lewis (philosopher)
- Robert Stalnaker
Place in the tradition
Part of Coherentism.
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