Definition
The term “counterfactual” was coined by philosopher Nelson Goodman (1947) to capture Roderick Chisholm’s more convoluted locution “contrary-to-fact” (Chisholm 1946). “Counterfactual” was initially used in reference to conditional statements with false antecedents such as “If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over” (Lewis 1973). Since, in reality, Kangaroos do have tails, this counterfactual conditional expresses a relation between a false antecedent and its consequent. The concept behind the term, however, has a longer history. For instance, Newton, Leibniz, and Laplace famously discussed various philosophical issues involving ways in which the world could have been, and many argue that Hume employed counterfactual considerations to define cause. Nevertheless, for most of the twentieth century, research on the meaning of counterfactual statements was very much confined to philosophy, and to areas such as logic, semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology. There was...
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De Brigard, F. (2022). Counterfactual Thinking. In: Glăveanu, V.P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90913-0_43
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