Editing Counterfactual conditional (section)

{{Short description|Conditionals that discuss what would have been if things were otherwise}}
{{Redirect|Counterfactual}}

'''Counterfactual conditionals''' (also ''contrafactual'', ''subjunctive'' or ''X-marked'') are [[conditional sentence]]s which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. <!-- this is example is from Iatridou (2000), ex (47c) on p. 244 --> "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here." Counterfactuals are contrasted with [[indicative conditionals|indicatives]], which are generally restricted to discussing open possibilities. Counterfactuals are characterized grammatically by their use of [[Counterfactual conditional#Fake tense|fake tense morphology]], which some languages use in combination with other kinds of [[Morphology (linguistics)|morphology]] including [[grammatical aspect|aspect]] and [[grammatical mood|mood]].

Counterfactuals are one of the most studied phenomena in [[philosophical logic]], [[formal semantics (natural language)|formal semantics]], and [[philosophy of language]]. They were first discussed as a problem for the [[material conditional]] analysis of conditionals, which treats them all as trivially true. Starting in the 1960s, philosophers and linguists developed the now-classic [[possible world]] approach, in which a counterfactual's truth hinges on its consequent holding at certain possible worlds where its antecedent holds. More recent formal analyses have treated them using tools such as [[causal model]]s and [[dynamic semantics]]. Other research has addressed their metaphysical, psychological, and grammatical underpinnings, while applying some of the resultant insights to fields including history, marketing, and epidemiology.

{{TOC limit|3}}