counterfactual

How To Use counterfactual In A Sentence

• Three Days to Never is, pretty clearly, a thematic consort of Declare, its immediate predecessor in Powers' canon, but although the new tale shares that novel's immurement in the mortal coils of 20th-century history, it reads as a counterfactual to Powers' previous unsparing insistence that the past 100 years or so of human life on this planet have been lived in the heart of darkness of theological abomination. Clute Reviews THREE DAYS TO NEVER
• But to generate knowledge independently of experience, a priori warrants must produce warranted true belief in counterfactual situations where experiences are different.
• What’s debatable is how hard Obama tried, because it’s hard to do counterfactuals and what ifs. Matthew Yglesias » Different Strokes
• So counterfactuals are not cases of straightforward logical implication.
• A particularly clear case of where you need it is in counterfactual conditionals: ‘If you did not sign on, your account could be temporarily suspended.’
• The tendency to demand purely qualitative descriptions of counterfactual situations has many sources.
• Such a semantics states truth conditions for counterfactuals in terms of relations among possible worlds.
• Predictions and counterfactual assertions are advanced conditioned by the assumption that no other exogenous causal factors intervene; that is, the assertive content of the hypothesis is that the economic processes under analysis will unfold in the described manner absent intervening causal factors. Correspondence, abstraction, and realism
• There was constant hysterical invocation of an absurd counterfactual scenario: ‘What if he actually was planning to nuke us in 45 minutes?’
• The truth makers for such counterfactuals must be either (a) the intensions of the agent that affects the selection, or (b) laws that determine how the relative fitness of having the traits would be selected in a possible world where the actual coextension doesn’t hold. 24 Against Darwinism