counterfactual

1. not comparableContrary 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.

   2021, Eliot Higgins, We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News, page 115

   Synonyms: contrafactual

2. not comparableOf or in comparison to a hypothetical state of the world.

   The counterfactual 1982 of the novel plays variations on our historical record and contains clear allusions to the present.

   2019 April 11, Marcel Theroux, “Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan review – intelligent mischief”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 04 Jul 2019

   1 more example

   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.

   2014 September 15, Martin Gayford, “There's more to Ming than a vase [print version: 16 August 2014, pp. R6–R7]”, in The Daily Telegraph (Review), archived from the original on 15 Nov 2014

plural counterfactuals

1. A claim, hypothesis, or other belief that is contrary to the facts.

   Synonyms: counterfact, misapprehension, misconception, misunderstanding, falsehood, misinformation

2. A hypothetical state of the world, used to assess the impact of an action.

   Imagine a counterfactual in which we started relaxing restrictions at an even earlier time, just as the cases began to trend downward.

   2021 May 14, Dashiell Young-Saver, “The Math of Ending the Pandemic: Exponential Growth and Decay”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 14 May 2021

   4 more examples

   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.

   2004 September 5, Laura Miller, “Imagine”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 15 Jul 2021

   We can spin out complicated counterfactuals that justify the Iraq invasion, and complicated counterfactuals that make it look even worse.

   2010 September 1, Ross Douthat, “Iraq in the Long Run”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 26 Nov 2022, retrieved 15 Jul 2021

   The implicit counterfactual — that these members would support gun control if not for the $1,000 they received from the NRA — seems unlikely to me.

   2015 December 3, Lee Drutman, “Here's the real reason we don't have gun reform”, in Vox, archived from the original on 05 Feb 2016

   Roese also says counterfactuals can serve emotional purposes. You can think about how things could have been worse, and so feel better about yourself, and grateful for where you are.

   2016 February 11, Noah Berlatsky, quoting Neal Roese, “'What if?': Why we can't get enough of counterfactual shows”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 12 Feb 2016

3. human sciencesA conditional statement in which the conditional clause is false.