Abstract
Counterfactuals are what ifs, thought experiments, Gedankenexperimenten, alternatives to actual history; they imagine what would have happened to an economy if, contrary to fact, some present condition were changed; in the philosophical literature therefore they are known also as ‘contrary-to-fact conditionals’.
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McCloskey, D.N. (2018). Counterfactuals. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_631
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_631
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