Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Running contrary to the facts.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective contrary to fact; -- of assertions, ideas, assumptions.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective
Contrary to thefacts ;untrue . - noun A
claim ,hypothesis , or otherbelief that is contrary to the facts.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective going counter to the facts (usually as a hypothesis)
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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This is what we call counterfactual history or speculation.
NPR Topics: News 2010
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This is what we call counterfactual history or speculation.
NPR Topics: News 2010
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This is what we call counterfactual history or speculation.
NPR Topics: News 2010
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The story is an exercise in counterfactual genre criticism in which a professor tells his class about the fictitious history and non-existent antecedent of Poe's famous story "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842).
REVIEW: The Best Horror Of The Year, Volume 2 edited by Ellen Datlow 2010
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The counterfactual is extremely difficult to test reliably given the small number of data points. we should be lowering the tax on labor and raising the tax on capital
Taxes and Market Time, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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In this example, the counterfactual is not sufficient to stretch the suspension of disbelief.
Archive 2006-07-01 Hal Duncan 2006
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In this example, the counterfactual is not sufficient to stretch the suspension of disbelief.
Strange Fiction 5 Hal Duncan 2006
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And that might well work – I think most people’s eyes glaze over when you try to explain counterfactual baseline estimates to them, and so they are just keeping an eye on the unemployment rate, which remains grim and may only have trended down a bit by the 2010 elections.
Matthew Yglesias » GOP Senate Candidates Takes on Scourge of Imitation People 2010
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And that might well work – I think most people’s eyes glaze over when you try to explain counterfactual baseline estimates to them, and so they are just keeping an eye on the unemployment rate, which remains grim and may only have trended down a bit by the 2010 elections.
Matthew Yglesias » GOP Senate Candidates Takes on Scourge of Imitation People 2010
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But then Brooks’s counterfactual is pointless, because you can’t choose to marry someone you can be happy with.
quotato commented on the word counterfactual
Running contrary to the facts: "Cold war historiography vividly illustrates how the selection of the counterfactual question to be asked generally anticipates the desired answer" (Timothy Garton Ash)
July 1, 2007
gangerh commented on the word counterfactual
The best use I heard of this was "What I'm hearing here is actually counterfactual". Meaning,of course,"You're a liar".
February 8, 2008