_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 3, pp 457 - 467 This reply to the critiques by Daniel Woolf, Cass R. Sunstein and Daniel Nolan of my book _Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History_, takes each of their contributions in turn, and reasserts the centrality to counterfactual history of positing definite, long term alternative timelines rather than a vague claim that things might have turned out differently to the way they actually did. Such alternate timelines have no claim to either truth or (...) utility since they ignore the many possible contingencies that would most likely have taken place following the initial deviation from the real timeline of history. (shrink)

What if Britain had stayed out of the First World War? What if Germany had won the Second? Historians have traditionally refused to ask questions of the past, preferring to assume that whatever happened was inevitable. ButVirtual Historychallenges this complacency as leading historians apply "counterfactual" arguments to decisive moments in modern history.

This work uses counterfactual conjectures to draw inferences from historical data. It proposes criteria for evaluating counterfactuals that occur in diverse methodological contexts including: comparative case studies; game theory; and statistical analysis.

Abstract There are at least eight good reasons practicing historians should concern themselves with counterfactual claims. Furthermore, four of these reasons do not even require that we are able to tell which historical counterfactuals are true and which are false. This paper defends the claim that these reasons to be concerned with counterfactuals are good ones, and discusses how each can contribute to the practice of history. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9817-z Authors Daniel Nolan, School of Philosophy, (...) Australian National University, 0200 Canberra, Australia Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

Woodward's long awaited book is an attempt to construct a comprehensive account of causation explanation that applies to a wide variety of causal and explanatory claims in different areas of science and everyday life. The book engages some of the relevant literature from other disciplines, as Woodward weaves together examples, counterexamples, criticisms, defenses, objections, and replies into a convincing defense of the core of his theory, which is that we can analyze causation by appeal to the notion of manipulation.

Counterfactuals is David Lewis' forceful presentation of and sustained argument for a particular view about propositions which express contrary to fact conditionals, including his famous defense of realism about possible worlds and his theory of laws of nature.

Causality offers the first comprehensive coverage of causal analysis in many sciences, including recent advances using graphical methods. Pearl presents a unified account of the probabilistic, manipulative, counterfactual and structural approaches to causation, and devises simple mathematical tools for analyzing the relationships between causal connections, statistical associations, actions and observations. The book will open the way for including causal analysis in the standard curriculum of statistics, artificial intelligence, business, epidemiology, social science and economics.

The abstract structure of inquiry - the process of acquiring and changing beliefs about the world - is the focus of this book which takes the position that the "pragmatic" rather than the "linguistic" approach better solves the philosophical problems about the nature of mental representation, and better accounts for the phenomena of thought and speech. It discusses propositions and propositional attitudes (the cluster of activities that constitute inquiry) in general and takes up the way beliefs change in response to (...) potential new information, suggesting that conditional propositions should be understood as projections of epistemic policies onto the world.Robert C. Stalnaker is a professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

What would have happened if--Alexander had not died in 323 B.C., Pontius Pilate had pardoned Jesus, Hitler had died in 1938...? The ramifications of these and many other hypothetical historical changes are explored in this newly revised version of the original German Ungeschehene Geschichte: Ein Traktat uber die Frage: Was ware geschen, wenn..... The author examines provocative questions in the context of actual events, using the accepted flow of historical succession to reach new conclusions. Also discussed are the obstacles for (...) thinking about history that never happened and a discussion of how these alternative possibilities are instructive in the understanding of actual events. (shrink)