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p.1 "Iffy" thinking is one of the characteristic resources of the sorts of creatures we humans have become... A thought experiment is an attempt to draw instruction from a process of hypothetical reasoning that proceeds by eliciting the consequences of a hypothesis which, for aught that one actually knows to the contrary, may well be false. It consists in reasoning from a supposition that is not (or not as yet) accepted as true - and perhaps is even known to be false - but is assumed provisionally in the interests of making a point or establishing a conclusion.
p.5 Informatively consequential conditionals are answers to "what-if" questions... They enable us to say something about what must, will, or can be in circumstances that we merely assume rather than believe. Without conditionals our thought would be restricted to reality - constrained to the decidedly limited, factual range of what is actually so. Speculation, planning, and conjecture would be aborted.
p.5 the main reason for preoccupation with the theory of conditionals is their role in broadening the range of reason. The crucial fact of it is that we can reason equally well both from fact and from supposition.
p.7 We live the whole of our physical existence in the realm of what is. But much of our mental existence is lived in the realm of what might be.
p.13 All sorts of capacities and capabilities are conveyed by if-then statements.
p.14 What would be lost by doing without conditionals - and so without hypothetical reasoning at large? ...We would be unable to speculate, to plan, to make inference, and in general to achieve a vast variety of communicative functions.
p.63 The plausibility of a belief is a reflection of its epistemic priority status - a matter not of its explicit substantive content but of its epistemic standing in the cognitive scheme of things. It indicates how central a role a contention plays within the wider framework of our cognition.
p.73 Let us now enter the region of cognitive pretense and make-believe - of "what-if."
p.73 What we have here is a counterfactual conditional: an answer to a question that asks what would transpire, were this antecedent false - or judged to be so. Just as explanations answer "why?" questions, these conditionals answer "what if?" questions.
p.75 A supposition is not an acknowledged fact, but a thesis that is accepted "provisionally" or laid down "for the time being"; it must be deemed false or at least uncertain to some extent - after all, if it were true there would be nothing assumptive about it... What alone matters is that it clashes with what is believed to be true. A hypothesis is not rendered belief contradicting through failure to square with the actual facts, but simply and solely through a conflict with other propositions that are accepted as true in the circumstances at hand.
p.75-76 Hypothetical inferences of the sort at issue with counterfactual conditionals arise over a wide range of subject matter, which include... Games and make-believe of all kinds.
p.84 The systemic integrity of facts indicates that we cannot make hypothetical modifications in the makeup of the real without thereby destabilizing everything and raising an unending series of questions.
p.87 In factual and counterfactual matters alike the power of abstract reasoning alone is limited. Logic as such does not tell us what propositions are true but only what inferences are valid - and thereby what we have to accept as true if certain statements (the premises) are true.
p.89 A counterfactual conditional offers a response to a "what-if" question that contemplates a fact-contradicting circumstance... a workable approach to the consequences of belief-contradicting hypothesis will have to focus not on the unmanageably wide range of all the abstractly available putative truths that are somehow relevant to the assumption at issue, but rather on the narrower, more restricted, and thus more manageable range of specifically salient beliefs that are deemed to be of special significance in the particular concrete setting of the given deliberations.
p.90 a belief is salient in the setting of a given problem-context when it is seen as being an item of knowledge that is not just relevant to but important for the range of questions and issues at hand... Salience... is a matter of questions, not answers, and it pivots on achieving clarity about the issues on the agenda of deliberation.
[JLJ - This almost qualifies as critical success factors discussed in business and warfare.]
p.92 That counterfactuals are formulation sensitive with respect to salient beliefs has far-reaching consequences... To realize informative counterfactuals we must augment considerations of belief-acceptability as such by considerations of salience - of contextual significance.
p.93 Salience, then, is a matter of configuring our overall beliefs to the situation of a particular problem-context, of effecting a concentration of focus within the overall manifold of our beliefs.
p.94 The validation of counterfactuals is an information-sensitive issue. Increasing the information available in our beliefs might... offer ampler opportunities for validating further counterfactuals or, alternatively, it could destabilize existing patterns to an extent that unravels previously available ones.
p.135 Counterfactuals are simply a special case of apory resolution required by the introduction of belief-contravening suppositions.
p.136 The crux of counterfactual analysis is thus not a matter of scrutinizing the situation of other possible worlds but rather of categorically prioritizing our beliefs regarding this actual one.
p.212-213 All that is ever required for the analysis of counterfactuals is a handful of plausible ground rules of precedence and priority to settle matters of conflict resolution - of "right of way" in a conflict of aporetic inconsistency among the immediately involved reality-appertaining propositions. And operating in this way does not call for any global device of the sort at issue with possible worlds; all we ever need is a local device for asserting the comparative priority of a few propositions.
p.213 In making the belief-contradicting assumption that the antecedent of such a conditional involves, we adopt a scenario that carries us outside the confines of the real. However, assessing the tenability of the conditional fortunately does not require any excursions into other fictional, unrealized worlds. We simply have to probe the priority structure of the manifold of our immediately relevant beliefs.
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