Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Counterfactual thinking is a concept in psychology that involves the human tendency to create possible alternatives to life events that have already occurred; something that is contrary to what actually happened.
Counterfactual history distinguishes itself through its interest in the very incident that is being negated by the counterfactual, thus seeking to evaluate the event's relative historical importance. Historians produce arguments subsequent changes in history, outlining each in broad terms only, since the main focus is on the importance and ...
A counterfactual statement is a conditional statement with a false antecedent. For example, the statement "If Joseph Swan had not invented the modern incandescent light bulb, then someone else would have invented it anyway" is a counterfactual, because, in fact, Joseph Swan invented the modern incandescent light bulb. The most immediate task ...
The World's Foremost Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, is an anthology of twenty essays and fourteen sidebars dealing with counterfactual history. It was published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1999, ISBN 0-399-14576-1, and this book as well as its two sequels, What If? 2 and What Ifs? of American History, were edited by Robert Cowley.
This chapter examines the third rung of the ladder of causation: counterfactuals. The chapter introduces 'structural causal models', which allow reasoning about counterfactuals in a way that traditional (non-causal) statistics does not. Then, the applications of counterfactual reasoning are explored in the areas of climate science and the law.
seemed natural to review 1980 and what had happened for each of us. Expecting the worst, we both found that we’d accomplished far more than we thought. We started to feel a bit more enthusiastic about ourselves and what lay ahead --- an experience which, by the way, has proved to be the case for nearly everyone who has participated in the
Counterfactual conditionals (also contrafactual, subjunctive or X-marked) are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here."
The ancient Greek δείκνυμι, deiknymi, 'thought experiment', "was the most ancient pattern of mathematical proof", and existed before Euclidean mathematics, [7] where the emphasis was on the conceptual, rather than on the experimental part of a thought experiment.