counterfactual
adjective
No English definition recorded for this entry.
L335676 on Wikidata ↗Wiktionary
Pronunciation: /ˌkaʊntɚˈfæktʃuəl/ / /ˌkaʊn.tə(ɹ)ˈfæk.tʃu.əl/
adj
Etymology: From counter- + factual.
- Contrary to known or agreed facts; untrue.
“a leaderless disinformation campaign, with claims leaping from conspiracy theorists to state propagandists to alternative-media outlets and back—an ecosystem I call the Counterfactual Community.”
- Of or in comparison to a hypothetical state of the world.
“What would have happened if those great Chinese voyages [by Zheng He] had continued? It's one of those questions in counter-factual history about which it is impossible to be sure.”
“The counterfactual 1982 of the novel plays variations on our historical record and contains clear allusions to the present.”
noun
Etymology: From counter- + factual.
- A claim, hypothesis, or other belief that is contrary to the facts.
- A hypothetical state of the world, used to assess the impact of an action.
“Just as counterfactuals employ too much imagination to qualify as historical works, alternate history often labors under too great a load of artificial "facts" to take flight as fiction.”
“We can spin out complicated counterfactuals that justify the Iraq invasion, and complicated counterfactuals that make it look even worse.”
- A conditional statement in which the conditional clause is false.