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Everything about Counterfactual conditional
Conditionals that discuss what would have been if things were otherwise
Counterfactual conditionals are conditional sentences that describe what would have been true if circumstances had been different, typically when the antecedent is taken to be false or incompatible with what actually happened. In English they are often formed with a past or irrealis morphology, as in "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here", and are standardly contrasted with indicative conditionals, which are generally used to discuss live or open possibilities. Wikipedia →
🧭 Start here: a 6-step reading path
- Read the overview: Counterfactual conditionalA 5-minute orientation
- Skim a recent paper: The influence of temporal information on online processing of counterfactual conditional sentences: Evidence from ERPs on temporal indicatorsInfluential work since 2022
- Pick up a classic book: Shakespeare in HindsightThe most-reprinted book on the subject
- Read the landmark paper: The Conditional Sink: Counterfactual Display in the Valuation of a Carbon Offsetting Reforestation ProjectCited 50 times
- Go sideways: Conditional sentenceA closely related topic
- Go sideways: English conditional sentencesA closely related topic
📖 Definitions
Noun (linguistics) A "what if" statement.
🗂️ The subject at a glance
🏆 Landmark papers (most cited)
The Conditional Sink: Counterfactual Display in the Valuation of a Carbon Offsetting Reforestation Project
The effects of output task types on noticing and learning of the English past counterfactual conditional
Basic Conditional Reasoning: How Children Mimic Counterfactual Reasoning
Conditional Reasoning and Emotional Experience: A Review of the Development of Counterfactual Thinking
The effect of causal chain length on counterfactual conditional reasoning
Children’s reasoning about other’s intentions: False-belief and counterfactual conditional inferences
First-time, first-repeat and multiple-repeat visitors: a conditional counterfactual quantile expenditure decomposition analysis
Counterfactuals vs. conditional probabilities: A critical analysis of the counterfactual theory of information
🆕 Influential since 2022
The influence of temporal information on online processing of counterfactual conditional sentences: Evidence from ERPs on temporal indicators
Temporal Shift Length and Antecedent Occurrence Likelihood Modulate Counterfactual Conditional Comprehension: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials
Sequential Conditional Transport on Probabilistic Graphs for Interpretable Counterfactual Fairness
Sparse Identification of Conditional relationships in Structural Causal Models (SICrSCM) for counterfactual inference
CACE: A Framework for Generating Counterfactual Explanations Aligned With Causal Structure via Jointly Learned Conditional Distributions
📚 Books worth reading
- 📕Shakespeare in HindsightAmir Khan · 2015
CounterfactualsLewis, David K. · 1973
Pacific War and Contingent VictoryMichael Myers · 2015- 📕Fei jing dian luo ji xi tong fa sheng xue yan jiuXiaoming Ren · 2011
- 📕A history of English counterfactualsRafał Molencki · 1999
The logic of conditionalsErnest W. Adams · 1975
Subjunctive reasoningJohn L. Pollock · 1976- 📕Irrealis und KonditionallogikWolfgang Waletzki · 1997
Ranked by number of editions on Open Library, a rough measure of how lasting a book is.
🔗 Related topics
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