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What's So Different about a Counterfactual?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Richard Ned Lebow
Richard Ned Lebow
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Abstract

The author contends that the difference between so-called factual and counterfactual arguments is greatly exaggerated; it is one of degree, not of kind. Both arguments ultimately rest on the quality of their assumptions, the chain of logic linking causes to outcomes, and their consistency with available evidence. He critiques two recent historical works that make extensive use of counterfactuals and finds them seriously deficient in method and argument. He then reviews the criteria for counterfactual experimentation proposed by social scientists who have addressed this problem and finds many of their criteria unrealistic and overly restrictive. The methods of counterfactual experimentation need to be commensurate with the purposes for which it is used. The author discusses three uses for counterfactual arguments and thought experiments and proposes eight criteria appropriate to plausible-world counterfactuals.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , July 2000 , pp. 550 - 585
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2000

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Maruyama contends that the very essence of the “butterfly effect” is that it cannot be discovered. He offers the example of a city built on the American plains because the first white settler awoke on an especially beautiful morning and took it as a sign to put down his stakes here rather than somewhere else. The coincidence of weather and intent was unpredictable and would be invisible as a cause to researchers a century later attempting to discover why the city grew up where it did.

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72 Lebow (fn. 37).

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