How the rational imagination develops remains an open question. The ability to imagine emerges early in childhood, well before the ability to reason counterfactually, and this suggests that imaginative thought may facilitate later counterfactual ability. In addition, developmental data indicate that inhibitory control may also play a role in the ability to reason counterfactually.

Many authors, both scholarly and otherwise, have asked what might have happened had Walter Benjamin survived his 1940 attempt to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. This essay examines several implicitly or explicitly “counterfactual” thought experiments regarding Benjamin’s “survival,” including Hannah Arendt’s influential “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” and asks why our attachment to Benjamin’s story has prompted so much counterfactual inquiry. It also explores the larger question of why few intellectual historians ask explicitly counterfactual questions in their work. While counterfactuals have (...) proven invaluable for scholars in diplomatic, military, and economic history, those writing about the history of ideas often seem less concerned with chains of events and contingency than some of their colleagues are—or they attend to contingency in a selective fashion. Thus this essay attends to the ambivalence about the category of contingency that runs through much work in intellectual history. Returning to the case of Walter Benjamin, this essay explores his own tendency to pose “what if?” questions, and then concludes with an attempt to ask a serious counterfactual question about his story. The effort to ask this question reveals one methodological advantage of counterfactual inquiry: the effort to ask such questions often serves as an excellent guide to the prejudices and interests of the historian asking them. By engaging in counterfactual thought experiments, intellectual historians could restore an awareness of sheer contingency to the stories we tell about the major texts and debates of intellectual history. (shrink)

Counterfactual analysis is an interesting feature of thought experiments, because it requires the imagination of alternative states of the world (see also publications by Fearon, Lebow and Stein, Reiss, and Tetlock and Belkin, who suggest the same). In historical analysis, the use of imagination is often the focus of criticisms of such counterfactual analysis. In this article, I consider three strategies for constraining imagination: making limited counterfactual changes, limiting counterfactual changes to the decisions (...) of important figures, and using evidence to restrict the scope for imagination. Given the focus of this special issue, I will relate this discussion to Lewis’s and Woodward’s analyses of counterfactuals in the philosophy of science. I show that counterfactual analysis in historical cases has some resemblance to Lewis’s and Woodward’s analyses, but that what Lewis calls “transition periods” cannot be left entirely vague, as Lewis suggests, nor can counterfactual changes be seen simply as interventions, as Woodward suggests. I propose that efforts to limit imagination in historical counterfactuals are ultimately problematic, but that imagination can nevertheless play a useful role in counterfactual analysis. (shrink)

Causal and counterfactual thoughts are bound together in Byrne's theory of human imagination. We think there are two issues in her theory that deserve clarification. First, Byrne describes which counterfactual possibilities we think of, but she leaves unexplained the mechanisms by which we generate these possibilities. Second, her exploration of and enablers gives two different predictions of which counterfactuals we think of in causal scenarios. On one account, we think of the counterfactuals which we have control over. (...) On the other, which counterfactuals we think of depends on whether something is a strong cause or an enabler. Although these two accounts sometimes give the same predictions, we present cases in which they differ, and we would like to see Byrne's theory provide a way of reconciling these differences. (shrink)

People frequently entertain counterfactual thoughts, or mental simulations about alternative ways the world could have been. But the perceived plausibility of those counterfactual thoughts varies widely. The current article interfaces research in the philosophy and semantics of counterfactual statements with the psychology of mental simulations, and it explores the role of perceived similarity in judgments of counterfactual plausibility. We report results from seven studies (N = 6405) jointly supporting three interconnected claims. First, the perceived plausibility of (...) a counterfactual event is predicted by the perceived similarity between the possible world in which the imagined situation is thought to occur and the actual world. Second, when people attend to differences between imagined possible worlds and the actual world, they think of the imagined possible worlds as less similar to the actual world and tend to judge counterfactuals in such worlds as less plausible. Lastly, when people attend to what is identical between imagined possible worlds and the actual world, they think of the imagined possible worlds as more similar to the actual world and tend to judge counterfactuals in such worlds as more plausible. We discuss these results in light of philosophical, semantic, and psychological theories of counterfactual thinking. (shrink)

Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far reaching implications. In the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events. We draw on the social psychology literature showing that imagining a future event increases the subjective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitive availability and the source monitoring framework provide reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event occurred. However, people routinely produce myriad (...) class='Hi'>counterfactual imaginings (i.e., daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse them with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a childhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of the target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had occurred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which imagination is used as an aid in searching for presumably lost memories. (shrink)

Counterfactual thinking involves imagining hypothetical alternatives to reality. Philosopher David Lewis argued that people estimate the subjective plausibility that a counterfactual event might have occurred by comparing an imagined possible world in which the counterfactual statement is true against the current, actual world in which the counterfactual statement is false. Accordingly, counterfactuals considered to be true in possible worlds comparatively more similar to ours are judged as more plausible than counterfactuals deemed true in possible worlds comparatively (...) less similar. Although Lewis did not originally develop his notion of comparative similarity to be investigated as a psychological construct, this study builds upon his idea to empirically investigate comparative similarity as a possible psychological strategy for evaluating the perceived plausibility of counterfactual events. More specifically, we evaluate judgments of comparative similarity between episodic memories and episodic counterfactual events as a factor influencing people's judgments of plausibility in counterfactual simulations, and we also compare it against other factors thought to influence judgments of counterfactual plausibility, such as ease of simulation and prior simulation. Our results suggest that the greater the perceived similarity between the original memory and the episodic counterfactual event, the greater the perceived plausibility that the counterfactual event might have occurred. While similarity between actual and counterfactual events, ease of imagining, and prior simulation of the counterfactual event were all significantly related to counterfactual plausibility, comparative similarity best captured the variance in ratings of counterfactual plausibility. Implications for existing theories on the determinants of counterfactual plausibility are discussed. (shrink)

Three studies examined the motivational implications of thinking about how things could have been worse. It was hypothesized that when these downward counterfactuals yield negative affect, through consideration of the possibility of a negative outcome, motivation to change and improve would be increased (the wake-up call). When downward counterfactuals yield positive affect, through diminishing the impact of a potentially negative outcome, motivation to change and improve should be reduced (the Pangloss effect). Results from three studies supported these hypotheses. Studies 1 (...) and 2 showed that a manipulation of the counterfactual made about an investment influenced decisions toward that investment. Study 3 showed that students’ academic motivation was influenced by a manipulation of the type of downward counterfactual they made after an exam and that affect mediated the relationship between the counterfactual and motivation. (shrink)

Counterfactual attitudes like imagining, dreaming, and wishing create a problem for the standard formal semantic theory of de re attitude ascriptions. I show how the problem can be avoided if we represent an agent's attitudinal possibilities using "multi-centered worlds", possible worlds with multiple distinguished individuals, each of which represents an individual with whom the agent is acquainted. I then present a compositional semantics for de re ascriptions according to which singular terms are "assignment-sensitive" expressions and attitude verbs are "assignment (...) shifters". (shrink)

In the present research, the authors hypothesized that additive counterfactual thinking mind-sets, activated by adding new antecedent elements to reconstruct reality, promote an expansive processing style that broadens conceptual attention and facilitates performance on creative generation tasks, whereas subtractive counterfactual thinking mind-sets, activated by removing antecedent elements to reconstruct reality, promote a relational processing style that enhances tendencies to consider relationships and associations and facilitates performance on analytical problem-solving tasks. A reanalysis of a published data set suggested that (...) the counterfactual mind-set primes previously used in the literature tend to evoke subtractive counterfactuals. Studies 1 and 2 then demonstrated that subtractive counterfactual mind-sets enhanced performance on analytical problem-solving tasks relative to additive counterfactual mind-sets, whereas Studies 3 and 4 found that additive counterfactual mind-sets enhanced performance on creative generation tasks relative to subtractive counterfactual mind-sets. (shrink)

Byrne (2005) assumes that counterfactual thinking requires a comparison of facts with an imagined alternative. In our view, however, this assumption is unnecessarily restrictive. We argue that individuals do not necessarily engage in counterfactual simulations exclusively to evaluate factual reality. Instead, comparative evaluation is often suspended in favor of experiencing the counterfactual simulation as if it were real.

Counterfactual reasoning is broadly implicated in causal claims made by historians. However, this point is more generally recognized and accepted by economic historians than historians of science. A good site for examining alternative appeals to counterfactuals is to consider "what if" the Scientific Revolution had not occurred in seventeenth-century Europe. Two alternative interpretations are analyzed: that the revolution would eventually have happened somewhere else or that the revolution would not have happened at all. Broadly speaking, these two interpretations correspond (...) to the respective attitudes of philosophers and historians to the development of science. However, a case is presented for synthesizing the two interpretations into a normative historiography of science that would allow past and present concerns to interrogate each other. This exercise in counterfactual reasoning can be imagined in the spirit of a time traveler who aims to persuade, rather than simply understand, the natives he or she encounters. (shrink)

In this paper, I raise a problem for standard precisifications of the Relational Analysis of attitude reports. The problem I raise involves counterfactual attitude verbs. such as ‘wish’. In short, the trouble is this: there are true attitude reports ‘ S wishes that P ’ but there is no suitable referent for the term ‘that P ’. The problematic reports illustrate that the content of a subject’s wish is intimately related to the content of their beliefs. I capture this (...) fact by moving to a framework in which ‘wish’ relates subjects to sets of pairs of worlds, or paired propositions, rather than—as is standardly assumed—sets of worlds. Although other types of counterfactual attitude reports, for example those involving ‘imagine’, may be similarly problematic, at this stage it is unclear whether they can be handled the same way. (shrink)

People tend to judge more recent events, relative to earlier ones, as the cause of some particular outcome. For instance, people are more inclined to judge that the last basket, rather than the first, caused the team to win the basketball game. This recency effect, however, reverses in cases of overdetermination: people judge that earlier events, rather than more recent ones, caused the outcome when the event is individually sufficient but not individually necessary for the outcome. In five experiments (N (...) = 5507), we find evidence for the recency effect and the primacy effect for causal judgment. Traditionally, these effects have been a problem for counterfactual views of causal judgment. However, we argue that an extension of a recent counterfactual model of causal judgment explains both the recency and the primacy effect. In line with the predictions of our extended counterfactual model, we also find that, regardless of causal structure, people tend to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the more recent event rather than to the earlier one. Moreover, manipulating this tendency affects causal judgments in the ways predicted by this extended model: asking participants to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the earlier event weakens the interaction between recency and causal structure, and asking participants to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the more recent event strengthens the interaction between recency and causal structure. We discuss these results in relation to work on counterfactual thinking, causal modeling, and late-preemption. (shrink)

The notion of mutation is applicable to the generation of novel designs and solutions in engineering and science. This suggests that engineers and scientists have to work against the biases identified in counterfactual thinking. Therefore, imagination appears a lot less rational than claimed in the target article.

The chapter defends an evolutionary explanation of modal knowledge from knowledge of counterfactual conditionals. Knowledge of counterfactuals is evolutionarily useful, as it enables us to learn from mistakes. Given the standard semantics for counterfactuals, there are several equivalences between modal claims and claims involving counterfactuals that can be used to explain modal knowledge. Timothy Williamson has suggested an explanation of modal knowledge that draws on the equivalence of ‘Necessarily p’ with ‘If p were false, a contradiction would be the (...) case’. He postulates a cognitive process that draws on this equivalence and that is supposed to underlie our modal judgements. The existence of this cognitive process would, however, have consequences that conflict with results from empirical psychology. The chapter argues that the equivalence of ‘Necessarily p’ with ‘For all q, if q were true then p would be true’ should instead be used to explain knowledge of necessity. This explanation requires giving an account of how we know truths of the form ‘For all q, if q were true then p would be true’. In order to provide such an account, the chapter draws on a different suggestion by Williamson about knowledge of generalizations. According to this suggestion, we come to know truths of the form ‘All Fs are G’ by imagining a generic F and judging that it is G. Applied to our case, the suggestion would be that we come to know that p is counterfactually implied by all propositions (and hence that p is necessary) by entertaining a generic proposition and judging that it counterfactually implies p. It would even suffice to entertain a generic possible proposition and judge that it counterfactually implies p, for it can be shown that the claim ‘For all possible q, if q were true then p would be true’ is equivalent to the original claim ‘For all q, if q were true then p would be true’ and hence is equivalent to ‘Necessarily p’. It might seem that, from an evolutionary perspective, probabilistic reasoning is just as useful as reasoning involving counterfactuals. The chapter argues, however, that this would not undermine the envisaged explanation of modal knowledge. The chapter concludes by suggesting avenues of empirical research that might shed light on the cognitive processes that actually underlie our evaluations of modal claims and on the relation between these processes and those involved in counterfactual reasoning. The results of such empirical research would be highly relevant epistemologically, since they will ultimately determine which (if any) equivalence between modal claims and claims involving counterfactuals should be used to explain our modal knowledge. (shrink)

What are counterfactuals and what is their point? In many cases, none at all. It may be true that if kangaroos didn't have tails, they would fall over, but they do have tails and if they didn't they wouldn't be kangaroos (or would they?). This is the sort of thing that can give counterfactuals a bad name, as inhabitants of a La La Land of the mind. On the other hand, counterfactuals do useful service across a broad range of disciplines (...) in both the sciences and the humanities, including philosophy, history, cosmology, biology, cognitive psychology, jurisprudence, economics, art history, literary theory. They are also richly, albeit sometimes treacherously, present in the everyday human realm of how our lives are both imagined and lived: in the 'crossroads' scenario of decision-making, the place of regret in retrospective assessments of paths taken and not taken, and, at the outer limit, as the wish not to have been born. Christopher Prendergast take us on a dizzying exploratory journey through some of these intellectual and human landscapes, mobilizing a wide range of reference from antiquity to the present, and sustained by the belief that, whether as help or hindrance, and with many variations across cultures, counterfactual thinking and imagining are fundamental to what it is to be human. (shrink)

Counterfactual thinking—the capacity to reflect on what would, could, or should have been if events had transpired differently—is a pervasive, yet seemingly paradoxical human tendency. On the one hand, counterfactual thoughts can be comforting and inspiring (Carroll & Shepperd, Chapter 28), but on the other they can be anxiety provoking and depressing (Zeelenberg & Pieters, Chapter 27). Likewise, such thoughts can illuminate pathways toward better future outcomes (Wong, Galinsky, & Kray, Chapter 11), yet they can also promote confusion (...) and lead us astray (Sanna, Schwarz, & Kennedy, Chapter 13). The first part of this chapter focuses on work that supports the prevailing Zeitgeist in the counterfactual thinking literature: Counterfactual thinking is beneficial. The second part of the chapter, however, strikes a more cautionary tone by reviewing work that describes some deleterious consequences of counterfactual thinking. We conclude by offering a tentative reconciliation of these conflicting perspectives and suggesting directions for future research. (shrink)

Three studies examined the motivational implications of thinking about how things could have been worse. It was hypothesized that when these downward counterfactuals yield negative affect, through consideration of the possibility of a negative outcome, motivation to change and improve would be increased (the wake-up call). When downward counterfactuals yield positive affect, through diminishing the impact of a potentially negative outcome, motivation to change and improve should be reduced (the Pangloss effect). Results from three studies supported these hypotheses. Studies 1 (...) and 2 showed that a manipulation of the counterfactual made about an investment influenced decisions toward that investment. Study 3 showed that students’ academic motivation was influenced by a manipulation of the type of downward counterfactual they made after an exam and that affect mediated the relationship between the counterfactual and motivation. (shrink)

Our imaginings seem to be similar to our perceiving and remembering episodes in that they all represent something. They all seem to have content. But what exactly is the structure and the source of the content of our imaginings? In this paper, I put forward an account of imaginative content. The main tenet of this account is that, when a subject tries to imagine a state of affairs by having some experience, their imagining has a counterfactual content. What the (...) subject imagines is that perceiving the state of affairs would be, for them, like having that experience. I discuss three alternative views of imaginative content, and argue that none of them can account for two types of error in imagination. The proposed view, I suggest, can account for both types of error while, at the same time, preserving some intuitions which seem to motivate the alternative views. (shrink)

Recent findings suggest that our capacity to imagine the future depends on our capacity to remember the past. However, the extent to which episodic memory is involved in our capacity to think about what could have happened in our past, yet did not occur , remains largely unexplored. The current experiments investigate the phenomenological characteristics and the influence of outcome valence on the experience of past, future and counterfactual thoughts. Participants were asked to mentally simulate past, future, and (...) class='Hi'>counterfactual events with positive or negative outcomes. Features of their subjective experiences during each type of simulation were measured using questionnaires and autobiographical interviews. The results suggest that clarity and vividness were higher for past than future and counterfactual simulations. Additionally, emotional intensity was lower for counterfactual simulations than past and future simulations. Finally, outcome valence influenced participants’ judgment of probability for future and counterfactual simulations. (shrink)

This chapter presents and contextualizes empirical work done by philosophers on imagination and creativity. It also suggests new directions for future empirical research. It is argued that empirical work on these (and other topics) is not just beneficial but necessary for philosophy of imagination and creativity. Further, it is argued that this work must sometimes be done by philosophers, and it is also often best done by philosophers. Topics discussed include imaginative resistance, counterfactual imagination, scientific (...) class='Hi'>imagination, distinguishing imagination from other mental states (e.g., supposition, memory), vividness of imagination, AI imagination, creativity and praiseworthiness, creativity as a virtue, and AI and creativity. (shrink)

"My argument is as follows. In the first section, I sketch briefly the ways in which intentionalism might provide a solution to the problem of vagueness. The second section describes the different areas in which counterfactuals must be invoked by intentionalism. In the third section I point out that on a classic analysis of counterfactuals - that of David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker - the truth conditions of counterfactuals depend on relations of similarity among possible worlds. Since similarity is vague, (...) so are counterfactuals. Finally, I show that there is no unique solution to the problem of vagueness for the specific types of counterfactuals required by intentionalists - those referring to authors' or legislators' mental states, and those attempting to transport historical authors into the present. Although some counterfactuals are relatively 'insensitive' - in Lewis's sense -- those required in intentionalist interpretation are at least moderately sensitive. This means taht different contexts will resolve the vagueness in different ways. The choice among contexts must be made by the interpreter and is not determined by author's intentions. Hence the vagueness due to counterfactual reasoning about author's intention leads to indeterminacies that cannot be resolved by intentionalism itself. Intentionalism is a solution neither to the problem of vagueness nor to the problem of indeterminacy." Distinguishes between strict intentionalism and moderate intentionalism. Both are often seen as a means for reducing vagueness in legal language. However, counterfactual intentions are needed to resolve certain problems. First, in combining actual intentions, e.g. in a legislature, where different combinations may result in different legislation. Second, it is needed to resolve conflicts between intentions, particularly between different levels of abstraction. Third, reducing vagueness, which will be necessary even with enactment intentions. Fourth, there may be no determinate intention that would even, in principle, resolve a borderline case - e.g. when intentions are conflated. [For discussion of application and enactment intentions, see Goldsworthy, "Originalism in Constitutional Interpretation," Federal Law Review 25: 1.] Lastly, counterfactuals may be necessary to distinguish between application and enactment intentions. Lewis on counterfactuals: "For Lewis and Stalnaker, the key idea in the explication of truth conditions of counterfactuals is that of 'comparative overall similarity' of possible worlds. A counterfactual is true if and only if in the closest, most similar world to the actual in which the antecedent of the conditional is true, the consequent of the conditional is also true." Thus, there may be a determinate relevant world for some cases - i.e. there may be a counterfactual that determines the answer to a counterfactual question. This, however, will not always be the case. For example, counterfactuals concerning Caesar being the leader of N. Korea. Here, for Lewis, where there are ties of closeness of counterfactuals, all tied CFs will be false. When considering counterfactual intentions for the sake of interpretation, some may be determinate or insensitive. Normally, however, this will not be the case. "For intentionalism to resolve the matter of whether the regulation prohibiting vehicles prohibits toy cars as well, one of these counterfactuals must be true and the other false. Imagine a possible world in which the oncsideration of the borderline case is added to the authors' mental states. It is likely that connected belief will be affected as well. For example consideration of the aim of the regulation will occur as a consequence of the consideration of whether the regulation applies to the borderline case: Is ensuring peace and quiet in the park overriding, or are there exceptions to accommodate children's games? When there are changes in a constellation of men tal states, we will have to imagine a situation in whichh the legislators' beleifs are very different from what they in fact were. This creates at least a profound epistemological problem, because, as Dworkin puts it: "[it] has the effect of sharply reducing the amount of historical evidence that is relevant to answering the counterfactual." More important, however, in some worlds in which the legislators consider the case of a child's toy car, they will treat the peace and quiet purpose as overriding, whereas in others they will treat the children's play purpose as overriding. This means that different worlds will resolve the truth-value of the counterfactuals differently." "If I am right that counterfactual reasoning is ubiquitous in intentionalism, intentionalism suffers from an extra dimension of vagueness and is therefore at a disadvantage when measured against theories that do not rely on counterfactuals.". (shrink)

There is some consensus on the claim that imagination as suppositional thinking can have epistemic value insofar as it’s constrained by a principle of minimal alteration of how we know or believe reality to be – compatibly with the need to accommodate the supposition initiating the imaginative exercise. But in the philosophy of imagination there is no formally precise account of how exactly such minimal alteration is to work. I propose one. I focus on counterfactual imagination, (...) arguing that this can be modeled as simulated belief revision governed by Laplacian imaging. So understood, it can be rationally justified by accuracy considerations: it minimizes expected belief inaccuracy, as measured by the Brier score. (shrink)

The present research extends previous functional accounts of counterfactual thinking by incorporating the notion of reflective and evaluative processing. Participants generated counterfactuals about their anagram performance, after which their persistence and performance on a second set of anagrams was measured. Evaluative processing of upward counterfactuals elicited a larger increase in persistence and better performance than did reflective processing of upward counterfactuals, whereas reflective processing of downward counterfactuals elicited a larger increase in persistence and better performance than did evaluative processing (...) of downward counterfactuals. Moreover, path analyses indicated that whereas the relationship between counterfactual thinking and persistence was accounted for by emotional responses following upward and downward counterfactual generation, the relationship between counterfactual thinking and performance was accounted for by enhanced persistence following reflective processing of downward counterfactuals, but was accounted for by both enhanced persistence and strategic thinking following evaluative processing of upward counterfactuals. (shrink)

Young children spend a large portion of their time pretending about non-real situations. Why? We answer this question by using the framework of Bayesian causal models to argue that pretending and counterfactual reasoning engage the same component cognitive abilities: disengaging with current reality, making inferences about an alternative representation of reality, and keeping this representation separate from reality. In turn, according to causal models accounts, counterfactual reasoning is a crucial tool that children need to plan for the future (...) and learn about the world. Both planning with causal models and learning about them require the ability to create false premises and generate conclusions from these premises. We argue that pretending allows children to practice these important cognitive skills. We also consider the prevalence of unrealistic scenarios in children's play and explain how they can be useful in learning, despite appearances to the contrary. (shrink)

As the opening line of Dickens' classic novel suggests, it is very often the case that people can imagine both better and worse alternatives to their present reality. Although Dickens was writing about events that occurred over two centuries ago, it remains just as true today that we clearly live in neither the best nor the worst of possible worlds. For instance, we can wish for the amelioration of present difficulties in the Middle East yet still take comfort in the (...) fact that the threat of nuclear war has been greatly reduced since the end of the Cold War. On a more mundane level, it is easy for us to imagine how various aspects of our lives, such as our jobs, marriages, or physical fitness, could be both better and worse. Undoubtedly due to the pervasiveness and intrinsically fascinating qualities of this phenomenon of imagining alternatives to reality, there has been a veritable explosion of research in recent years on what have been termed mental simulation and counterfactual thinking processes. This chapter speculates upon and provides evidence for the antecedents and consequences of two types of counterfactuals: upward (it could have been better) and downward (it could have been worse). The importance of studying the antecedents and consequences of counterfactual direction lie in the differential structures, emotions, intentions, inferences, and behavioral consequences of upward versus downward counterfactual thinking. (shrink)

Counterfactuals abound in science, especially when reasoning about and with models. This often requires entertaining counterfactual conditionals with nomologically or metaphysically impossible antecedents, namely, counternomics or counterpossibles. In this paper I defend the make-believe view of scientific counterfactuals, a naturalised fiction-based account of counterfactuals in science which provides a means to evaluate their meanings independently of the possibility of the states of affairs their antecedents describe, and under which they have non-trivial truth-values. Fiction is here understood as imagination (...) (in contrast with its most typical association with falsity), characterised as a propositional attitude of pretense or ‘make-believe’ (Walton 1990). The application of this theory to scientific counterfactuals makes their evaluation a game of make-believe: a counterfactual is (fictionally) true iff its antecedent and the rules of the game prescribe the imagining of its consequent (Kimpton-Nye 2020). The result is a practice-based account of counterfactuals and counterfactual reasoning in science which incorporates insights from theoretical and experimental analytic philosophy as well as cognitive science. This way, the make-believe view of scientific counterfactuals shows that the evaluation of scientific counterfactuals is none other than a question of scientific representation in disguise. (shrink)

Why do humans imagine alternatives to reality? The experiments conducted by Byrne explain the mental mechanisms we use when we do just this – that is, imagine one, or more, alternative reality. But why do we do this? The general reason is to give ourselves an explanation of the world, to tell stories; at times to console ourselves, and at times to despair. A good story is not only based on a description of what happened, but also hints at, or (...) explains, what might have happened. Depending on our aim, we construct different kinds of counterfactuals. In all cases, however, we are faced with constraints. These constraints are specific to a given domain of beliefs and use of counterfactuals. (shrink)

The human imagination remains one of the last uncharted terrains of the mind. People often imagine how events might have turned out something had been different. The of reality, those aspects more readily changed, indicate that counterfactual thoughts are guided by the same principles as rational thoughts. In the past, rationality and imagination have been viewed as opposites. But research has shown that rational thought is more imaginative than cognitive scientists had supposed. In The Rational Imagination, (...) I argue that imaginative thought is more rational than scientists have imagined. People exhibit remarkable similarities in the sorts of things they change in their mental representation of reality when they imagine how the facts could have turned out differently. For example, they tend to imagine alternatives to actions rather than inactions, events within their control rather than those beyond their control, and socially unacceptable events rather than acceptable ones. Their thoughts about how an event might have turned out differently lead them to judge that a strong causal relation exists between an antecedent event and the outcome, and their thoughts about how an event might have turned out the same lead them to judge that a weaker causal relation exists. In a simple temporal sequence, people tend to imagine alternatives to the most recent event. The central claim in the book is that counterfactual thoughts are organised along the same principles as rational thought. The idea that the counterfactual imagination is rational depends on three steps: (1) humans are capable of rational thought; (2) they make inferences by thinking about possibilities; and (3) their counterfactual thoughts rely on thinking about possibilities, just as rational thoughts do. The sorts of possibilities that people envisage explain the mutability of certain aspects of mental representations and the immutability of other aspects. (shrink)

Ruth Byrne presents a three-step argument to the conclusion that counterfactual imagining is rational. Insofar as this argument is valid, the conclusion is weaker than it seems. More importantly, it does not represent the central contributions of this book – contributions that, if anything, point instead to what is irrational about counterfactual imagining.

Imagination and rational thought may be guided by identical principles, and Byrne's (2005) analysis expertly synthesizes a diverse literature on counterfactual thinking. Further attention should be paid to metacognitive experiences, like ease or difficulty of thought generation, which accompany the imaginative process. Only by considering metacognitive experiences along with the content of what people imagine can we fully understand imagination.

The (dis)continuism debate in the philosophy and cognitive science of memory concerns whether remembering is continuous with episodic future thought and episodic counterfactual thought in being a form of constructive imagining. I argue that settling that dispute will hinge on whether the memory traces (or “engrams”) that support remembering impose arational, perception-like constraints that are too strong for remembering to constitute a kind of constructive imagining. In exploring that question, I articulate two conceptions of memory traces—the replay theory and (...) the prop theory—that return conflicting answers to whether remembering is constructive imagining. The prop theory’s vision of traces is suggestive of continuism, while the replay theory’s is a natural fit for discontinuism. Which view of traces is in fact correct remains undetermined by current empirical work. Nevertheless, it may already be possible to reach a compromise in the (dis)continuism debate, through the development of a conciliatory continuist causal theory. This view—only outlined here—accepts the continuism-friendly prop theory of traces, while still requiring that genuine remembering fulfills an appropriate causation condition, as required by the kinds of causal theories of remembering typically favored by discontinuists. (shrink)

Counterfactuals are a species of conditionals. They are propositions or sentences, expressed by or equivalent to subjunctive conditionals of the form 'if it were the case that A, then it would be the case that B', or 'if it had been the case that A, then it would have been the case that B'; A is called the antecedent, and B the consequent. Counterfactual reasoning typically involves the entertaining of hypothetical states of affairs: the antecedent is believed or presumed (...) to be false, or contrary-to-the-fact, but its truth is imagined or supposed. Counterfactual reasoning is thus a form of modal reasoning, kindred to reasoning about necessity or possibility, and in contrast to reasoning about the way things actually are. The philosophical study of conditionals goes back at least as far as the Stoics of ancient Greece, although their systems of logic apparently did not accord the counterfactual any emphasis. The rise in interest in counterfactuals has been a rather recent phenomenon, as it started to become clear to philosophers that counterfactuals are implicated in a host of other important concepts—laws of nature, confirmation, causation, scientific explanation, knowledge, perception, dispositions, free action, etc. The significance of counterfactuals has also become increasingly appreciated in the.. (shrink)

The paper addresses the problem of imaginative resistance in science, that is, why and under what circumstances imagination sometimes resists certain scenarios. In the first part, the paper presents and discusses two accounts concerning the problem and relevant for the main thesis of this study. The first position is that of Gendler (Journal of Philosophy 97:55–81, 2000), (Gendler, in: Nichols (ed) The Architecture of the Imagination: New essays on pretence, possibility and fiction, Oxford University Press, New York, 2006a), (...) (Gendler & Liao, in: Gibson, Carroll (eds) The routledge companion to philosophy of literature, Routledge, New York, 2016), according to which imaginative resistance mainly concerns evaluative scenarios, presenting deviant moral attitudes. The second account examined is that of Kim et al. (in: Cova, Réhault (eds) Advances in experimental philosophy of aesthetics, Bloomsbury, London, 2018), who insisted on the link between imaginative resistance on the one hand and counterfactual and counterdescriptive scenarios on the other. In the light of both theories, this paper discusses the importance of addressing the problem of imaginative resistance in the scientific enterprise in the light of some mechanisms of embodied simulation, based on the activity of mirror neurons and investigated within the framework of the Embodied Simulation Theory. (shrink)

A standard view in the epistemology of imagination is that imaginings can either provide justification for modal beliefs about what is possible (and perhaps counterfactual conditionals too), or no justification at all. However, in a couple of recent articles, Kind (2016; Forthcoming) argues that imaginings can justify empirical belief about what the world actually is like. In this article, I respond to her argument, showing that imagination doesn't provide the right sort of information to justify empirical belief. (...) Nevertheless, it can help us take advantage of justification that we already have, thereby enabling us to form new doxastically justified beliefs. More specifically, according to the view I advocate, imagination can contribute to one's satisfaction of the proper basing condition – which turns propositional justification into doxastic justification – but without conferring any new justification that the subject isn't already in possession of upon their beliefs. Very little attention has been devoted to the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification in the literature on imagination, and the view I here argue for takes up a yet-to-be occupied position. (shrink)

This article explores situational determinants and psychological consequences of counterfactual excuse-making - denying responsibility by declaring `I couldn’t have known.’ Participants who were made accountable for a stock investment decision that resulted in an outcome caused by unforeseeable circumstances were particularly likely to generate counterfactual excuses and, as a result, to deny responsibility for the outcome of their choices and minimize their perceptions of control over the decision process. The article discusses the implications of these findings for structuring (...) accountability reporting relationships in business and, more generally, stresses the benefits of counterfactual denials of responsibility for maintaining self-esteem and a desired self-identity. (shrink)

What is our epistemic access to metaphysical modality? Timothy Williamson suggests that the epistemology of counterfactuals will provide the answer. This paper challenges Williamson's account and argues that certain elements of the epistemology of counterfactuals that he discusses, namely so called background knowledge and constitutive facts, are already saturated with modal content which his account fails to explain. Williamson's account will first be outlined and the role of background knowledge and constitutive facts analysed. Their key role is to restrict our (...) imagination to rule out irrelevant counterfactual suppositions. However, background knowledge turns out to be problematic in cases where we are dealing with metaphysically possible counterfactual suppositions that violate the actual laws of physics. As we will see, unless Williamson assumes that background knowledge corresponds with the actual, true laws of physics and that these laws are metaphysically necessary, it will be difficult to address this problem. Furthermore, Williamson's account fails to accommodate the distinction between conceivable yet metaphysically impossible scenarios, and conceivable and metaphysically possible scenarios. This is because background knowledge and constitutive facts are based strictly on our knowledge of the actual world. Williamson does attempt to address this concern with regard to metaphysical necessities – as they hold across all possible worlds – but we will see that even in this case the explanation is questionable. These problems, it will be suggested, cannot be addressed in a counterfactual account of the epistemology of modality. The paper finishes with an analysis of Williamson's possible rejoinders and some discussion about the prospects of an alternative account of modal epistemology. (shrink)

When we evaluate artworks, we often point to what an artist could have done or what a work could have been in order to say something about the work as it actually is. Call this counterfactual reasoning in art criticism. On my account, counterfactual claims about artworks involve comparative aesthetic judgments between actual artworks and hypothetical variations of those works. The practice of imagining what an artwork could have been is critically useful because it can help us understand (...) how artworks achieve specific aesthetic effects. I conclude by responding to an objection to my account on the basis that it violates the widely accepted acquaintance principle in aesthetics, on which aesthetic judgments must be based on firsthand perceptual encounters with their objects. (shrink)

I compare two prominent approaches to knowledge of metaphysical modality, the more traditional approach via conceiving viz. imagining a scenario and a more recent approach via counterfactual reasoning. In particular, Timothy Williamson has claimed that the proper context for a modal exercise of imagination is a counterfactual supposition. I critically assess this claim, arguing that a purely conceivability/imaginability-based approach has a key advantage compared to a counterfactual-based one. It can take on board Williamson’s insights about the (...) structure of modal imagination while avoiding aspects of counterfactual reasoning which are orthogonal to figuring out metaphysical modality. In assessing whether A is possible, we creatively devise test scenarios, psychologically and metaphysically apt A-scenarios, which manifest the relevant metaphysical requirements and test them for their compatibility with A. In this exercise, imagination is subject to implicit constraints as Williamson has it, but it is not bound to drawing consequences from minimally altering actuality such as to make room for A. (shrink)

In response to criticism following news of the mistreatment of Iraqis at the US prison in Abu Ghraib, some media personalities and politicians suggested that the treatment of these prisoners ‘‘would have been even worse’’ had former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein still been in power. It was hypothesized that the contemplation of this argument has undesirable consequences because counterfactual thinking can elicit both contrastive and assimilative effects. In the reported study, participants considered how the prisoners at Abu Ghraib would (...) have been worse off under Saddam. The results revealed that generating downward counterfactuals made participants feel better about Abu Ghraib (thereby evidencing contrast), and also lowered ethical standards regarding how the US should treat prisoners of war in the future (thereby evidencing assimilation). (shrink)

Four studies show that observers and readers imagine different alternatives to reality. When participants read a story about a protagonist who chose the more difficult of two tasks and failed, their counterfactual thoughts focused on the easier, unchosen task. But when they observed the performance of an individual who chose and failed the more difficult task, participants' counterfactual thoughts focused on alternative ways to solve the chosen task, as did the thoughts of individuals who acted out the event. (...) We conclude that these role effects may occur because participants' attention is engaged when they experience or observe an event more than when they read about it. (shrink)

People judge that an individual who attempts to harm someone but fails should be blamed and punished more when they imagine how things could have turned out worse, compared to when they imagine how things could have turned out the same, or when they think only about what happened. This moral counterfactual amplification effect occurs when people believe the protagonist had no reason for the attempt to harm, and not when the protagonist had a reason, as Experiment 1 shows. (...) It occurs for intentional failed attempts to harm and also for accidental near-misses, as Experiment 2 shows, but not for failed attempts in which the harm occurs anyway by another cause, for both general judgments about the event and specific judgments about the individual's actions, as Experiments 3 and 4 show. The implications for understanding the role of counterfactual thoughts in moral judgement are discussed. (shrink)