What's So Different about a Counterfactual?

Abstract

The author contends that the difference between so-called factual and counterfactual arguments is greatly exaggerated; it is one of degree, not of kind. Both arguments ultimately rest on the quality of their assumptions, the chain of logic linking causes to outcomes, and their consistency with available evidence. He critiques two recent historical works that make extensive use of counterfactuals and finds them seriously deficient in method and argument. He then reviews the criteria for counterfactual experimentation proposed by social scientists who have addressed this problem and finds many of their criteria unrealistic and overly restrictive. The methods of counterfactual experimentation need to be commensurate with the purposes for which it is used. The author discusses three uses for counterfactual arguments and thought experiments and proposes eight criteria appropriate to plausible-world counterfactuals.

The Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking

“…In the best stories of the alternate history genre (in which the entire story takes place in a counterfactual world), there are a few key differences between the story's setting and reality, framed by innumerable similarities, such as the laws of physics and basic characteristics of human nature. Counterfactuals within narratives that follow this minimal rewrite rule are, we suggest, the most compelling and most persuasive (Lebow, 2000;Tetlock & Belkin, 1996).…”

President Al Gore and the 2003 Iraq War: A Counterfactual Test of Conventional “W”isdom

“…The method has been used by prominent scholars to weigh competing explanations for world wars, the end of the Cold War, the escalation of contemporary international crises and many other transformative events in world history~see Fearon, 1991;Ferguson, 2000;Lebow, 2000;Levy, 2008b;Tetlock and Lebow, 2001! The method has been used by prominent scholars to weigh competing explanations for world wars, the end of the Cold War, the escalation of contemporary international crises and many other transformative events in world history~see Fearon, 1991;Ferguson, 2000;Lebow, 2000;Levy, 2008b;Tetlock and Lebow, 2001!…”

Scenarios and counterfactuals as modal narratives

“…In such narratives, causes, logics, plot-lines, outcomes, punch-lines, hingepoints and analytical schemata depend upon the interplay of agency-in-context within a modal world. Such narratives have existed since Homer [12] and are ubiquitous, if sometimes unconsciously deployed, in almost every style of historical [13] or scientific [14] endeavour. Any literary, historical and scientific narratives that engage with causation, in particular, are saturated with modality.…”

“…Virtual history emphasises the role of narrative in capturing chance, or contingency, in history. Virtual history approaches, however, have been criticised [12] as lightweight and unscholarly: as being too close to the ''playing parlour games with history'' criticised by E.H. Carr [38], as offering no other reason for engaging with counterfactuals other than to develop and celebrate a sensitivity to contingency, as offering limited theoretical and methodological guidance, and as having placed counterfactual research in a conceptual straitjacket by over-determining the circumstances in which it is a legitimate scholarly practice.…”

“…In his review, Lebow [12] draws attention to a difference between what he calls 'plausible' and 'miracle' counterfactuals: plausible-world counterfactuals must impress readers as realistic and historically sound (the minimal re-write rule, and so on) whereas miracle-world counterfactuals violate plausibility or even possibility -to assess the power of extant historical explanations, to challenge, and to provoke. It is this third approach that we have tended to emphasise in this paper -which is not, of course, to downplay the importance of the other two or to suggest they have less to offer practitioners of foresight.…”