Counterfactual: meaning, example and synonyms
Counterfactualadj. Relating to what did not happen but might have happened under different conditions.
Example
In a counterfactual analysis, the economists estimated how the region's growth would have unfolded had the railway never been built.
- Part of speech
- adjective
- Synonyms
- hypothetical, speculative, imagined, conditional
- Antonyms
- factual, actual, real, historical
- Memory tip
- counter ("against") + factual: running against the facts, a "what if".
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Check yourself: Counterfactual in context
Asking how the war might have ended if the treaty had been signed a year earlier, the historian constructed ______ scenarios that, she acknowledged, could never be tested directly.
Answer: counterfactual. "How the war might have ended if" asks about events that did not happen, which is what counterfactual describes. Nothing suggests the scenarios were dishonest, exhausting or shapeless.
Students were asked to write ______ histories, imagining in detail how their town would differ today if the river had never been dammed.
Answer: counterfactual. Imagining the town "if the river had never been dammed" means describing what might have happened under different conditions. Unimportant, impossible to overcome and rigidly opinionated don't fit a what-if exercise.