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Altered Pasts : Counterfactuals in History. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. ISBN 978-1611685381. Ferguson, Niall (1997). Virtual History : Alternatives and Counterfactuals. London: Picador. ISBN 978-0-330-35132-4. Hawthorn, Geoffrey (1991). Plausible Worlds : Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences.
Upward counterfactuals have a greater preparative function and focus on future improvement, while downward counterfactuals are used as a coping mechanism in an affective function. Furthermore, additive counterfactuals have shown greater potential to induce behavioral intentions of improving performance. [16]
Physicalist approaches offer alternative solutions to the problem of counterfactuals within a materialist framework. The interventionist account, developed by philosophers like James Woodward, solves the problem by defining counterfactuals in terms of specific physical interventions on causal systems.
Counterfactuals are characterized grammatically by their use of fake tense morphology, which some languages use in combination with other kinds of morphology including aspect and mood. Counterfactuals are one of the most studied phenomena in philosophical logic, formal semantics, and philosophy of language.
Theories of counterfactuals try to determine the conditions under which counterfactuals are true or false. The most well-known approach, due to Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis, proposes to analyze counterfactuals in terms of similarity between possible worlds. [7] [26] A possible world is a way things could have been.
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The subject of counterfactual definiteness receives attention in the study of quantum mechanics because it is argued that, when challenged by the findings of quantum mechanics, classical physics must give up its claim to one of three assumptions: locality (no "spooky action at a distance"), no-conspiracy (called also "asymmetry of time"), [4] [5] or counterfactual definiteness (or "non ...
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.