Counterfactuals sit at the crossroads of a wide set of theoretical interests in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. Current linguistic debates on counterfactuals address problems in compositionality and the syntax–semantics interface, theories of context change, crosslinguistic variation in the construction of modal meanings, presupposition projection, scalar implicatures, and the interaction between temporal meanings and modal meanings, among other things. This chapter offers a brief overview of some of the central debates in the linguistic literature. The aim is to provide the reader with a preliminary panorama and a starting point for later excursions. The chapter offers a discussion of the criteria called upon to identify counterfactuals, a brief review of some aspects of their logic, and an overview of foundational theoretical proposals in the field.