I’ve heard the story.  I’ve read the story.  And I just watched the story on the History Channel while I was mortifying my flesh on the treadmill.  The Christmas Truce of 1914 is truly a historical wonder, but not for conventional interpretation.

For context, a quick re-telling: On the Western Front, five months into World War I, British and German soldiers made enemies through no act of their own, found themselves staring across No Man’s Land at each other on Christmas Eve.  Across that void, the British heard Germans singing, “Stille nacht, heilige nacht…” and some of them began to sing back, “Silent night, holy night…”

Peace broke out.  Enemies met in that space between the trenches and exchanged food, chocolate, trinkets, buttons and other bits of memoriabilia.  There was a small Christmas tree.  They even had a soccer match.  It must have been an absolutely miraculous moment.

The Christmas Truce so took hold that the British officers actually had a pretty hard time getting their troops back into a more bellicose posture.  According to the History Channel telling, it took a British officer essentially murdering a defenseless German soldier to jump-start the war.  Four long years of horrific bloodshed ensued.

Historians on the program opined that the “reason” such a moment could take place was because the combatants could – in the Christmas moment – recognize their common “humanity” in each other.  The narrator even used the word “fellowship” in describing how quickly and well these men bonded with each other.

Completely lacking was the historians’ recognition of the common faith of the British and German soldiers.  What an astonishing blind spot!  Recognizing the “humanity” in someone else does nothing to explain this moment and, worse, it positively ignores the obvious.  These British and German combatants, in hearing the songs of Christmas, recognized their common Lord.  Something bigger than France, Britain or Germany was revealed, if only for a moment – the governance of the Prince of Peace.

Now let’s play the historian’s game and think about counterfactuals – the “what might have happened” had event B taken place rather than event A.  So, in my little scenario, let’s say that the troops – recognizing the implication of Christians killing other Christians – on both sides had refused to carry on with the war.  What if they had realized that both  British and German followers of Jesus had something in common that transcends national status?  What if the moment had been permitted to develop (the History Channel program played out just this possibility that perhaps the war might have been permitted to stop right then), which might have dramatically foreshortened what became a long and bloody war?

A Christmas Truce of 1914 that led to peace would have prevented the humiliation of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles…and Hitler would not have happened.  There would not have been the smoldering resentment in Germany that fed his demonic vision.  The German economy would not have been shattered.  The political situation would have been different.  Most likely, a Hitler would not have happened.   No Hitler, no World War II.  Imagine a history without either World War I or II.

The  Christmas Truce of 1914 is a historical marvel.  We ought to scour history for other such moments.  They show us the Prince of Peace ruling.  If only we recognized him.  Come, Lord Jesus.

Time for a little in house debate between Protestants in preparation for my dangerous posts on “Why I am not a Catholic” and “Why I am not a Calvinist”, which will lose me 90% of my Christian readers. Sigh. I don’t want to lose any readers, but I like to be me!

Anyway…

I spotted this article over on Birds of the Air blog. (H/T Neil Simpson)

Excerpt:

Classical Wesleyan Arminianism:

1. Humans are naturally unable to make any effort towards salvation
2. Salvation is possible by grace alone
3. Works of human effort cannot cause or contribute to salvation
4. God’s election is conditional on faith in Jesus
5. Jesus’ atonement was for all people
6. God allows his grace to be resisted by those unwilling to believe
7. Salvation can be lost, as continued salvation is conditional upon continued faith

Standard Calvinism:

1. Total Depravity – After the Fall, human will was given over to sin and is as if it were dead, so that without being “awakened” by the Holy Spirit (the initiator) a human is unable to choose to be saved.
2. Unconditional Election – God’s choice was not determined by anything ever done or to be done by a human; it is a free gift not earned by merit. Under this view, God is the initiator of salvation.
3. Particular Redemption (AKA Limited Atonement) – The blood of Christ was a substitution for the penalty of sin, and was effectual for the forgiveness of sins. Therefore, it not only secures but guarantees salvation.
4. The Efficacious Call of the Holy Spirit (AKA Irresistible Grace) – The outward call to salvation is made to all, but the Holy Spirit also places an inward call in the hearts of those who are elected for salvation. The outward call can (and often is) resisted, but the inward call is more powerful than human willpower. The Holy Spirit causes the sinner to respond in faith.
5. Perseverance of the Saints – The Holy Spirit will keep the believer secured in faith in Christ to the end.

I am basically in agreement with the Classical Arminian view, and I would accept the following points of Calvinism: Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Definite Atonement. I totally disagree with Irresistible Grace. Perseverance of the Saints is fine, except for people who literally reject their former faith. I.e. – you can’t lose your salvation by committing sins X,Y and Z. I am a 3.99 point Calvinist.

For my non-Christian readers who struggle with understanding why you are assumed to be in rebellion, ask yourself how much of your busy lives you have spent trying sincerely to decide whether God is really there by watching debates, making friends with Christians, visiting church, reading the Bible, praying test prayers, etc. Before God starts to work on you, you are in full flight away from God. That’s just the way it is.

When you are at the point of inventing an infinite number of universes to explain the fine-tuning, you’ll know what I am talking about. For every 100 non-Christians who starts to make that speculative multiverse reply to the fine-tuning argument, maybe 1 of you closes his mouth and says “ENOUGH”.

The doctrine of middle knowledge

And I think Wesleyans like me can recover an extremely robust view of divine sovereignty by invoking the doctrine of middle knowledge. This is the view that God can foresee what any individual will do in any set of circumstances (counterfactuals of creaturely freedom). And he uses this middle knowledge to actualize a world in which everyone who can freely choose to be respond to God’s saving initiative will be placed in the exact time and place where they would freely respond.

Consider Paul’s defense in Athens on Mars Hill: (in Acts 17:22-31)

²²Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. ²³For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

²⁴“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. ²⁵And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. ²⁶From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. ²⁷God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ²⁸‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

²⁹“Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill. ³⁰In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. ³¹For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.”

I’ve actually stood on Mars Hill, so this is a special, special passage for me.

Without God’s actualization of the conditions needed to save each individual person, no one could be saved. And it’s more than just the time and place, God has to individually reveal just the right amount of himself to the person in that time, so that they have the choice to respond without being coerced. So you have unilateral salvation initiated by God, but man is still responsible for rejecting God. It’s PERFECT!

If you haven’t heard of middle knowledge, I highly recommend that you take a look at it. It solves the problem of reconciling divine foreknowledge, free will and human responsibility. It’s kind of new though, so you may not have heard about it unless you are into philosophy of religion research. I went to a Wheaton Philosophy conference which had the Calvinist Paul Helm of Oxford University as the main speaker. He plowed, but the consensus among the audience (90% in the people I surveyed and judging from audience questions) was that middle knowledge was the correct solution to these thorny problems.

Further study

I have to mention this post on Between Two Worlds linked by Muddling Towards Maturity. This has to do with the scope of the atonement.

For whom did Christ Die?

Michael Bird posts three short entries by three different scholars regarding the intent and extent of the atonement:

• Paul Helm (Calvinist View)
• Michael Jensen (Amyraldian View)
• Ben Witherington (Arminian View)

My guy in the race is my favorite historian, Ben Witherington, but I’m not familiar with Jensen. Witherington is highly qualified scholar who is respected and endorsed across the spectrum. He is an evangelical.

I’ll be posting something about the atonement later this week.

One of the most difficult questions for Christians to answer, especially when posed by adherents of other religions, is the question of what happens to those who have never heard of Jesus? In this post, I will explain how progress in the field of philosophy of religion has given us a possible (and Biblical) solution to this thorny question.

First, Christianity teaches that humans are in a natural state of rebellion against God. We don’t want to know about him, and we don’t want him to have any say in what we are doing. We just want to appropriate all the gifts he’s given us, do whatever we want with them, and then have eternal bliss after we die. We want to do whatever we want and then be forgiven, later.

Along comes Jesus, who, through his sinless life and his death on the cross, heals that rift of rebellion between an all-good God and rebellious man. Now we have a real understanding of the fact that God is real, that he has power over death, and that he has very specific ideas on what we should be doing. If we accept Jesus’ atoning sacrifice and follow his teachings, we can avoid the penalty of our rebellion.

The only problem is that in order to appropriate that free gift of reconciliation, people need to actually know about Jesus. And there are some people in the world who have not even heard of him. Is it fair that these other people will be sent to eternal separation from God, just because they happened to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Enter William Lane Craig to save the day. His solution is that God orders the world in such a way that anyone who would freely choose to acknowledge Jesus and appropriate his teachings in their decision-making will be given eternal life. God knows in advance who would respond, and chooses their time and place of birth, and he supplies them with the amount of evidence they need.

And this agrees with what the Bible teaches. The apostle Paul says this in his apologetic on Mars Hill in Acts 17:22-31:

22 So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects.
23 “For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘  N D ‘ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.
24 “The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands;
25 nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things;
26 and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation,
27 that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us;
28 for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’
29 “Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man.
30 “Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent,
31 because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.”

In this research paper, Craig explains in detail how God foreknows how people will choose in every set of circumstances, and how God uses that knowledge to get everyone where they need to be without violating their free will. God wants the best for everybody, and has ordered to whole universe in order to give each of us our best opportunity for eternal life.

Here is a summary of the  what is in his paper:

The conviction of the New Testament writers was that there is no salvation apart from Jesus. This orthodox doctrine is widely rejected today because God’s condemnation of persons in other world religions seems incompatible with various attributes of God.

Analysis reveals the real problem to involve certain counterfactuals of freedom, e.g., why did not God create a world in which all people would freely believe in Christ and be saved? Such questions presuppose that God possesses middle knowledge. But it can be shown that no inconsistency exists between God’s having middle knowledge and certain persons’ being damned; on the contrary, it can be positively shown that these two notions are compatible.

Go read this paper and equip yourself to answer this common question!

And now I want to close by making a general point. There are two kinds of people in the world. The first kind encounters problems, like the hiddenness of God, or the problem of evil, the problem of Cookie monster objections (thanks, Truthbomb!), or religious pluralism, and they respond by leveraging that problem in order to justify rejecting God and going their own way.

Even uninformed Christians read books like “The Da Vinci Code”, and avoid the arguments and evidence that would defeat the objections raised by that book. Why? They want to be lazy, or to fit in, or to pursue pleasure apart from God. This is because if we don’t know that God is real for certain then we won’t feel rationally compelled to be good. And that’s why many Christians go out of their way not to find out the truth about these thorny problems.

And doubts also relieve us of the burden of evangelizing. Uninformed Christians know that their doubts give them freedom to keep silent about God, so they can get along with non-Christians. They think that keeping the truth about God to themselves, and not being ready and available to answer questions, is loving. But it’s really just selfishness. It doesn’t help non-Christians to keep the truth from them.

So why do some Christians hide the truth from others? It’s because they really do not believe that God will exclude people based on their beliefs about Him, even though Jesus says so in many places. Deep down, we believe that God’s purpose for humans is to be happy. When Christians don’t try to find answers to difficult questions like religious pluralism, they end up softening the Bible’s exclusive claims based on their emotions.

This is not what ambassadors are supposed to do – we are not free to make up our own doctrines and then lie to people in order to be happy and popular.

The second group is willing to spend time and effort to assess whether science, history, philosophy, etc.  support Christianity. This kind of person is willing to go where the evidence leads. They don’t jump on doubts and use them to justify disobedience. They are willing to be public (i.e. – “divisive”) about their faith and put God first, above worldly goals, like popularity.

The whole point of life is for God to draw people to himself in a two-way relationship. He reveals himself a little, and we respond and pursue him. How about you? Do you want to know for certain whether God is real? Are you willing to give up everything to follow him? Or would you rather he just keep out of your busy life and your subjective purposes in the world?

UPDATE: A related post over at Tough Questions Answered on whether Jesus is required to be rightly related to God and to get eternal life.

I basically agree with DymaxionWorldJohn’s argument that there was never a moment where the United States had any real “primacy” (at least militarily) in the international scene.  Yes, after the Cold War, the United States was in a position of absolute military supremacy relative to the rest of the world.  But looking at the 1990s, it’s not terribly clear to me that the United States was much successful at using military force to attain its foreign policy goals (the only metric that really matters).

This actually is a good time to expand on something I’ve been thinking about lately.  I recently finished Andrew Bacevich’s “The Limits of Power,” and he spends a lot of time emphasizing that it was a belief in absolute American primacy which drove the Bush Administration to pursue wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Indeed, Bacevich takes care to note that for many folks in the Bush Administration, Iraq was only the beginning; neoconservatives in the administration intended to use Iraq as a starting point to transform the Middle East through the application of American military power.  That is, frankly, a pretty terrifying prospect.  Imagine if Iraq was successful; there is a very real chance that we would have been embroiled in conflicts across the Middle East, from Damasacus to Tehran.  Instead, the fact of our failure in Iraq – our inability, as the world’s sole superpower, to pacify a relatively marginal “third-world” nation – has prompted us to at least on a very small scale reevaluate the efficacy of American power.

To borrow from Matt Yglesias, we can’t continue stumbling from failure to failure, if only for the simple fact that it will diminish American power to the point of near-worthlessness.  If Iraq forces us to reevaluate our use of military force, to make us more cautious about using said strength, to aim for attainable foreign policy goals (this does not include “establishing democracy”), and most importantly, to rid of us of this belief in absolute American primacy.  Then I think that it’s worth considering the idea that our failure Iraq was – in a very broad sense – a good thing for the United States.

My mom pointed out that Elliot Sober did not, in fact, write the “If you had a brother, would he like potato pancakes?” joke. She says she heard it as a child from my great-grandfather. And it’s older than that: one version of the joke appears in the 1858 comedy Our American Cousin (most famous nowadays as the last play Abraham Lincoln ever saw.) The comic engine of Our American Cousin is the upper-class twit Lord Dundreary, who brought the house down with business of this nature:

Dun What do they keep in pigeon houses? Oh! pigeons, to be sure;
they couldn’t keep donkeys up there, could they? That’s the dairy,
I suppothe?

Geo Yes, my lord.

Dun What do they keep in dairies?

Geo Eggs, milk, butter and cheese.

Dun What’s the name of that animal with a head on it? No,
I don’t mean that, all animals have heads. I mean those animals
with something growing out of their heads.

Geo A cow?

Dun A cow growing out of his head?

Geo No, no, horns.

Dun A cow! well, that accounts for the milk and butter;
but I don’t see the eggs; cows don’t give eggs; then there’s the cheese–
do you like cheese?

Geo No, my lord.

Dun Does your brother like cheese?

Geo I have no brother. I’m so delicate.

Dun She’s so delicate, she hasn’t got a brother. Well,
if you had a brother do you think he’d like cheese?

I had an odd experience last night: I stayed up very late playing Fallout 3 (very fun) and as usual in such games I died an awful lot. Of course I kept reloading my save game, sometimes kicking myself for not quicksaving more regularly. At a suitable point in my game, in the wee hours of the morning, I saved everything and headed to bed, pausing only to gulp down the glass of wine that had been untouched for hours.

Now I don’t know about you but if I drink alcohol before going to sleep, especially on an empty stomach, I generally sleep for about two hours and am then wide awake staring at the ceiling for the next three or four. It’s one of those things I’ve learnt to avoid doing but there are times, like last night, that I forget. So as I drifted into alcohol-aided slumber, I caught myself regretting the merlot slowly seeping into my veins.

And then a thought occured to me… I had saved just before drinking the wine. If I just restored to that save point I could go back and make a different choice.

Sadly life doesn’t have a quicksave button and I couldn’t put my idea into action. The event, however, made me consider the interesting topic of game saving.

At first blush, the ability to save and load games would seem to belong in the ’shell’ of the game: a utility only (along with, say, keyboard control settings) and not part of the gameplay itself. If they are implemented poorly they can be a nuiscance, but otherwise we don’t think too much about them.

However the more I think about it, the more it seems that saving and reloading play a fundamental aesthetic role in many games. They allow us to do what is impossible in real life: to go back in time and try again. In life we often ask ourselves “What would have happened if I had approached this in a different way?”. In a game, we can find out the answer.

Some gamers regard this as “cheating”. ‘Old skool’ games, which were often unrelentingly hard, rarely allowed saving. When you died, you started again from the beginning. To this day, Nethack only reluctantly implements saving — as an admission that the game is too long to win in one sitting. When you reload the game, the old save file is deleted. This is to prevent you from “save-scumming” — that is, from restarting from the same position several times to get a better outcome — and it is defended passionately by its players. If you want to be flamed, drop by rec.games.roguelike.nethack and suggest that this feature should be changed.

Braid on the other had, takes the opposite extreme. Every action (almost) can be immediately undone with a single button press. Mistime a jump? Press ‘X’ to rewind. After playing for a while, it’s hard to return to other games without the feature.

I can see the case against: there is a value in accepting the hand that fate deals you and plowing ahead. Sometimes I am tempted to spoil my own fun by going back and replaying a scene to get the best outcome, but is this the game designer’s fault? To what degree do I need the game to police my play? This is a non-trivial question. Without constraints, there is no challenge. Without meaningful consequences, choice is irrelevant.

Still, there is something to be said for the pleasure of going back and trying it a different way. Historians, novelists and film-makers have often considered these kinds of counterfactuals (with varying degrees of seriousness). They give us insight into the cause-and-effect processes of life. Games give us an extraordinary power to make these counterfactuals real, a power we’re only just beginning to explore. I’m keen to see where it takes us.

I came back this morning from a very brief trip to California to speak at Southern California Number Theory Day, hosted this year at UC Irvine. The other speakers were terrific, well worth undergoing the pain of a red-eye flight back Midwest. (Non-math material follows below the SCNTD sum-up, for those readers who don’t cotton to the number theory.)

• Brian Conrad talked about his work (some of it with Gabber and G. Prasad) on finite class numbers for algebraic groups, and an alternative to the notion of “reductive group” over global function fields of characteristic p, where the usual notion doesn’t behave quite as well as you expect. Very clear, and very much in Brian’s style in its admirable refusal to concede any “simplifying assumptions.” Well, except the occasional avoidance of characteristic 2.
• Jeff Achter talked about a circle of results, many joint with Pries, about the geography of the moduli space of curves in characteristic p. Here you have lots of interesting subvarieties that don’t have any characteristic 0 analogue, such as the “p-rank r stratum” of curves whose Jacobians have exactly p^r physical p-torsion points. Typical interesting theorem: the monodromy representation of the non-ordinary locus (a divisor in M_g) surjects onto Sp_2g, just as the monodromy representation of M_g itself does. I asked Jeff whether we know what the fundamental group of the non-ordinary locus is — he didn’t know, which means probably nobody does.
• Christian Popescu closed it out with a beautiful talk arguing that we should replace the slogan “Iwasawa theory over function fields is about the action of Frobenius on the Tate module of a Jacobian” with “Iwasawa theory over function fields is about the action of Frobenius on the l-adic realization of a 1-motive related to the Jacobian.” This point of view — joint work of Popescu and Greither — cleans up a lot of things that are customarily messy, and shows that different-looking popular conjectures at the bottom of the Iwasawa tower are in fact all consequences of a suitably formulated Main Conjecture at the top.

On the way over I’d eaten a dispiriting lunch at the St. Louis airport Chili’s, where I waited twenty minutes for a hamburger I can only describe as withered. Last night, I got to LAX with an hour and a half to spare, and the Rays and Phillies in the 7th inning of a close game 3. And the only place to watch it was Chili’s. This time I was smart enough just to order a Diet Coke and grab a seat with a view of the plasma screen.

The airport Chili’s, late on a Word Series night, turns out to be a pretty pleasant place. People talk to you, and they talk about baseball. On one side of me was a pair of fifty-something women on their way to Australia to hang out with tigers in a nature preserve. One was a lapsed Orioles fan from Prince George’s County, the other had no team. On the other was a guy from Chicago in a tweed jacket who writes for the Daily Racing Form. He liked the Mets. We all cheered for Philadelphia, and pounded the table and cussed when Jayson Werth got picked off second in the 8th in what seemed at the time the Phils’ best chance to score. (Werth, you might remember, used to be the Orioles’ “catcher of the future”; in the end, he never played a major-league game for the Orioles, or behind the plate.)

The game went into the bottom of the 9th tied 4-4, about a half hour before I was supposed to board. I figured I’d miss the end. But a hit batsman, a wild pitch, and an off-line throw to second put Eric Bruntlett on third with nobody out. Tampa Bay intentionally walked the next two hitters to get to Carlos Ruiz.

Question 1: Was this wise? I understand you set up the force, and I understand you want to put the worst Phillies hitters in the critical spot. But even a pretty bad hitter suddenly turns pretty good if you can’t walk him. And the extra two baserunners mean that Tampa Bay is still in big trouble even if Bruntlett is out at the plate after a tag-up. Mitchel Lichtman of The Hardball Times says Joe Maddon blew this decision.

And then: well, you probably saw this on TV, but Ruiz hits a slow, goofy chopper up the third-base line. Evan Longoria charges it, but by the time he gets there Bruntlett is almost home; Longoria heaves a desperate moonball in the general direction of home plate, only much, much higher; Phillies win.

Question 2a: Would Longoria have had a play if he’d stopped, set, and thrown, instead of trying to fling the ball to the catcher mid-dive?

Question 2b: Should Longoria have tried to make the play at all? Suppose he’d just stood at third, recognizing he had no play. Maybe Bruntlett scores and the Phillies win; but maybe the ball rolls foul, sending everyone back to their base with the game still tied. My Racing Form neighbor was convinced the ball was headed foul, and that Longoria had blown the game by picking it up. Subquestion: Would any human being alive have the self-control not to charge the ball in this situation?

Question 2c: A commenter on Baseball Think Factory proposed a counterfactual ending for this game even more outlandish than what actually occurred. Say Longoria runs towards the ball, sees he has no play, decides not to pick it up and hope it rolls foul. The ball rolls past Longoria, headed towards third base, as Bruntlett crosses the plate. If the ball stays fair, Phillies win; if not, Ruiz bats again. So the ball’s rolling along the line, and meanwhile, Shane Victorino, who started on second, is rounding third — and as he passes the ball he kicks it fair. Now Victorino is clearly out for interfering with the ball in play. But in this scenario, has Philadelphia won the game?

There has been an intensive debate about whether modus ponens fails for indicative conditionals. Less attention has been paid to the question of whether similar examples can be constructed for counterfactuals as well. This is insofar surprising as McGee claimed that the Import/Export principle (which leads to the counterexamples for indicatives) holds also for counterfactuals. So, are there counterexamples to modus ponens for counterfactuals?

Let us recall the setting of McGee’s counterexample. There are three candidates for the 1980 election: the two republicans Reagan and Anderson, and the democrat Carter. The polls see Carter far behind Reagan, with Anderson a distant third. Prima facie, McGee’s counterexample can go counterfactual. Suppose I know about the polls but do not receive any relevant information afterwards, perhaps because I go on a safari trip or because I just don’t care. After the time of the election I consider the following argument:

(1) If a republican had won, then if it had not been Reagan, it would have been Anderson.

(2) A republican won.

(3) Therefore, if Reagan had not won, it would have been Anderson.

Given the polls, I will find the premises highly probable although I will dissent from the conclusion. This comes as a surprise: if an inference is classically valid, the uncertainty of the conclusion cannot exceed the sum of the uncertainties of the premises. This puts pressure on the validity of modus ponens for right-nested counterfactuals.

Posted by Moritz.

Yet intuitions are quite shaky when it comes to the evaluation of counterfactuals with a true antecedent. Since modus ponens is such a valuable tool, we may happily pay the prize of blaming some intuitions which are not stable anyway to be misleading. This strategy would be appealing if the putative counterexamples were simply an idiosyncrasy of our language. But there seems to be a systematic principle in the background which serves to generate the counterexamples, namely the infamous Import/Export principle:

(IE) Counterfactuals of the form (A > (B > C)) are logically equivalent to the corresponding counterfactuals of the form ((A & B) > C).

The Import/Export principle sounds fine for many counterfactuals. Consider for instance its application to (1):

(4) If a republican had won and it had not been Reagan, then it would have been Anderson.

It seems natural to take (1) and (4) to be equivalent. Now, hardly anyone thinks that the inference from ((A & B) > C) and A to (B > C) is valid for counterfactuals. But by the Import/Export principle, any invalidating sequence for this pattern of inference generates a counterexample to modus ponens. Thus, the Import/Export principle may provide a systematic reason of why counterexamples to modus ponens occur. Modus ponens can only be saved if Import/Export fails in all the relevant cases.

In a recent talk, David Etlin considers the following counterexamples to the Import/Export principle for counterfactuals (you can find the corresponding paper here).

(5) Even if this match had lit at noon today, it would not have done so if it had been soaked in water last night.

(6) If this match had lit at noon today and had been soaked in water last night, then it would not have lit at noon today.

(7) If this match had lit at noon today, then even if it had been soaked in water last night it would have lit at noon today.

(8 ) If this match had lit at noon today and had been soaked in water last night, it would have lit at noon today.

(5) seems to be true whereas (6) is false, and (7) seems to be false whereas (8 ) is true. If this is so, then we have counterexamples to Import/Export for both of its directions. But the counterexamples are not as clear as one would like them to be. Both (5) and (7) contain an extra “even” (note also that in (5) the counterfactual in the consequent is presented in reversed order). Let us remove these additional features. We would then arrive at the following sentences:

(5′) If this match had lit at noon today, then if it had been soaked in water last night, it would not have lit at noon today.

(7′) If this match had lit at noon today, then if it had been soaked in water last night, it would have lit at noon today.

(5′) sounds quite bad, and even if (7′) is somewhat pointless, it does not seem to be false. This might be because we would probably assent to

(9) If this match had lit at noon today, then if it had been soaked in water last night, it would have had to have dried rather quickly.

Thus, it does not seem that Etlin has given us clear counterexamples to Import/Export, which is not to deny that there isn’t a challenge here.

Now, “even if”-conditionals may very well differ semantically from the corresponding conditionals in which “even” is dropped. Typically, we take an “even if”-conditional to imply its consequent. But I do not see how this feature could explain why inserting “even” in the counterfactuals under consideration effects our judgement. As you can check, the relevant implications seem to be o.k. What else can be said?

For a start, consider the following conditional which comes from (5) by turning the past past in the antecedent into a simple past tense:

(10) If this match lit at noon today, it would not have done so if it had been soaked in water last night.

This seems indeed to be true. But this is because the outer conditional is now an indicative one which only has a counterfactual in its consequent. Now, a past past in the antecedent does not necessarily command a subjunctive consequent:

(11) I had a look at this match in the afternoon. If it had lit at noon, it had not been soaked in water last night.

To my ears, the indicative conditional sounds grammatical. Since there is no double subjunctive, nested counterfactuals may be syntactically ambiguous between a counterfactual within a counterfactual and a counterfactual within an indicative. Clearly, the first interpretation is the default one. But context may sometimes favour the outer indicative interpretation. It would be nice if the pragmatics of “even” could be shown to support the indicative interpretation. Compare the following two sequences:

(12) I looked at this match in the afternoon. Probably, it had not lit at noon. Even if it had, it would not have done so if it had been soaked in water last night.

(13) I am certain that the match did not light at noon. Even if it had, it would not have done so if it had been soaked in water last night.

In (12) “probably” invites an “even” within an indicative construction. In (13), however, “certain” forces a counterfactual interpretation. Interestingly, (12) seems to be o.k. whereas (13) appears to be odd. Isn’t this evidence that “even” favours an indicative interpretation with respect to the example under consideration?

Perhaps there is also an alternative explanation. Proponents of Import/Export sometimes hold that the antecedent of the conditional within the consequent of the outer conditional restricts the antecedent of the outer conditional. So, the syntactic structure of an embedded conditional is something like this: [if A: if B] [C]. Perhaps “even” influences the syntax of a sentence by interfering with the default binding structure which then becomes [even if A] [if B: C].

Anyone out there with a better explanation?

There has been an intensive debate about whether modus ponens fails for indicative conditionals. Less attention has been paid to the question of whether similar examples can be constructed for counterfactuals as well. This is insofar surprising as McGee claimed that the Import/Export principle (which leads to the counterexamples for indicatives) holds also for counterfactuals. So, are there counterexamples to modus ponens for counterfactuals?

Let us recall the setting of McGee’s counterexample. There are three candidates for the 1980 election: the two republicans Reagan and Anderson, and the democrat Carter. The polls see Carter far behind Reagan, with Anderson a distant third. Prima facie, McGee’s counterexample can go counterfactual. Suppose I know about the polls but do not receive any relevant information afterwards, perhaps because I go on a safari trip or because I just don’t care. After the time of the election I consider the following argument:

(1) If a republican had won, then if it had not been Reagan, it would have been Anderson.

(2) A republican won.

(3) Therefore, if Reagan had not won, it would have been Anderson.

Given the polls, I will find the premises highly probable although I will dissent from the conclusion. This comes as a surprise: if an inference is classically valid, the uncertainty of the conclusion cannot exceed the sum of the uncertainties of the premises. This puts pressure on the validity of modus ponens for right-nested counterfactuals.

Posted by Moritz.

Yet intuitions are quite shaky when it comes to the evaluation of counterfactuals with a true antecedent. Since modus ponens is such a valuable tool, we may happily pay the prize of blaming some intuitions which are not stable anyway to be misleading. This strategy would be appealing if the putative counterexamples were simply an idiosyncrasy of our language. But there seems to be a systematic principle in the background which serves to generate the counterexamples, namely the infamous Import/Export principle:

(IE) Counterfactuals of the form (A > (B > C)) are logically equivalent to the corresponding counterfactuals of the form ((A & B) > C).

The Import/Export principle sounds fine for many counterfactuals. Consider for instance its application to (1):

(4) If a republican had won and it had not been Reagan, then it would have been Anderson.

It seems natural to take (1) and (4) to be equivalent. Now, hardly anyone thinks that the inference from ((A & B) > C) and A to (B > C) is valid for counterfactuals. But by the Import/Export principle, any invalidating sequence for this pattern of inference generates a counterexample to modus ponens. Thus, the Import/Export principle may provide a systematic reason of why counterexamples to modus ponens occur. Modus ponens can only be saved if Import/Export fails in all the relevant cases.

In a recent talk, David Etlin considers the following counterexamples to the Import/Export principle for counterfactuals (you can find the corresponding paper here).

(5) Even if this match had lit at noon today, it would not have done so if it had been soaked in water last night.

(6) If this match had lit at noon today and had been soaked in water last night, then it would not have lit at noon today.

(7) If this match had lit at noon today, then even if it had been soaked in water last night it would have lit at noon today.

(8 ) If this match had lit at noon today and had been soaked in water last night, it would have lit at noon today.

(5) seems to be true whereas (6) is false, and (7) seems to be false whereas (8 ) is true. If this is so, then we have counterexamples to Import/Export for both of its directions. But the counterexamples are not as clear as one would like them to be. Both (5) and (7) contain an extra “even” (note also that in (5) the counterfactual in the consequent is presented in reversed order). Let us remove these additional features. We would then arrive at the following sentences:

(5′) If this match had lit at noon today, then if it had been soaked in water last night, it would not have lit at noon today.

(7′) If this match had lit at noon today, then if it had been soaked in water last night, it would have lit at noon today.

(5′) sounds quite bad, and even if (7′) is somewhat pointless, it does not seem to be false. This might be because we would probably assent to

(9) If this match had lit at noon today, then if it had been soaked in water last night, it would have had to have dried rather quickly.

Thus, it does not seem that Etlin has given us clear counterexamples to Import/Export, which is not to deny that there isn’t a challenge here.

Now, “even if”-conditionals may very well differ semantically from the corresponding conditionals in which “even” is dropped. Typically, we take an “even if”-conditional to imply its consequent. But I do not see how this feature could explain why inserting “even” in the counterfactuals under consideration effects our judgement. As you can check, the relevant implications seem to be o.k. What else can be said?

For a start, consider the following conditional which comes from (5) by turning the past past in the antecedent into a simple past tense:

(10) If this match lit at noon today, it would not have done so if it had been soaked in water last night.

This seems indeed to be true. But this is because the outer conditional is now an indicative one which only has a counterfactual in its consequent. Now, a past past in the antecedent does not necessarily command a subjunctive consequent:

(11) I had a look at this match in the afternoon. If it had lit at noon, it had not been soaked in water last night.

To my ears, the indicative conditional sounds grammatical. Since there is no double subjunctive, nested counterfactuals may be syntactically ambiguous between a counterfactual within a counterfactual and a counterfactual within an indicative. Clearly, the first interpretation is the default one. But context may sometimes favour the outer indicative interpretation. It would be nice if the pragmatics of “even” could be shown to support the indicative interpretation. Compare the following two sequences:

(12) I looked at this match in the afternoon. Probably, it had not lit at noon. Even if it had, it would not have done so if it had been soaked in water last night.

(13) I am certain that the match did not light at noon. Even if it had, it would not have done so if it had been soaked in water last night.

In (12) “probably” invites an “even” within an indicative construction. In (13), however, “certain” forces a counterfactual interpretation. Interestingly, (12) seems to be o.k. whereas (13) appears to be odd. Isn’t this evidence that “even” favours an indicative interpretation with respect to the example under consideration?

Perhaps there is also an alternative explanation. Proponents of Import/Export sometimes hold that the antecedent of the conditional within the consequent of the outer conditional restricts the antecedent of the outer conditional. So, the syntactic structure of an embedded conditional is something like this: [if A: if B] [C]. Perhaps “even” influences the syntax of a sentence by interfering with the default binding structure which then becomes [even if A] [if B: C].

Anyone out there with a better explanation?

To which extent are counterfactuals context-dependent? Lewis suggested that we can do without a systematic dependence on context by combining an invariant similarity relation with a variably strict analysis of counterfactuals. Recently, this approach has been challenged partly by drawing attention to the phenomenon of reversed Sobel sequences: sometimes it seems as if the order in which two counterfactuals are uttered makes for a difference in truth-value. Philosophers who take this phenomenon to be semantic in nature have reacted to it by allowing the similarity relation to vary from context to context (for instance, have a look at von Fintel’s semantics for counterfactuals, which you can find here). In this note, I’d like to challenge the semantic analysis of reversed Sobel sequences by arguing that it does not square well with a plausible link between “would”-counterfactuals and “might”-counterfactuals.

Here is the phenomenon. In an initial context, the counterfactual

(1) If she had been at the concert, she would have seen Mick Jagger

may be truly asserted, or so it is assumed. Subsequently, the counterfactual

(2) If she had been at the concert and got stuck behind a group of tall people, she would not have seen Mick Jagger

may be accepted, too. All this is to be expected on Lewis’s account: strengthening the antecedent is not a valid rule of inference. But now suppose that (1) and (2) are uttered in reversed order: it seems that asserting (1) after (2) is not o.k. There is something odd about saying

(3) If she had been at the concert and got stuck behind a group of tall people, she would not have seen Mick Jagger, but if she had been at the concert, she would have seen Mick Jagger.

So, can the order in which these counterfactuals are uttered affect their truth-values?

 Posted by Moritz.

There is a plausible link between “would”-counterfactuals and “might”-counterfactuals. We can capture it with the following principle:

(M) A counterfactual of the form “If A had been the case, B would have been the case” is assertable just in case “If A had been the case, B might not have been the case” is rejectable (if A is taken to be possible).

On Lewis’s account, there is a straightforward explanation for this: the former “would”-counterfactuals are true just in case the latter “might”-counterfactuals are false. To put it another way, “might”-counterfactuals are duals of the corresponding “would”-counterfactuals.

Now, in order for the phenomenon of reversing Sobel sequences to get off the ground, one really needs the fact that (1) is assertable in the initial context. Given (M), this requires that 

(4) If she had been at the concert, she might not have seen Mick Jagger (because she might have been stuck behind a group of tall people)

can be rejected. But in the circumstances most naturally associated with the example, (4) cannot be rejected. This suggests that (1) wasn’t really assertable in the first place. Perhaps it seemed o.k. to assert it because one did not think of the possibility that she might have got stuck behind tall people. Plausibly, if the standards of assertability are low, a counterfactuals passes these standards if most of the close antecedent-worlds are consequent-worlds. But once certain possibilities are mentioned, the standards of assertability are raised, and beeing close to the truth isn’t good enough any longer. 

Note that the picture changes if (4) can be rejected. Suppose it is known that there weren’t any tall people around at the concert. Then (4) can indeed be rejected and (1) is indeed fully assertable in the initial context. But then it doesn’t seem clear to me that (3) would not be o.k. Perhaps the following utterance would lack a decisive point, but from a semantic perspective it seems fine:

(3′) If she had been at the concert and got stuck behind a group of tall people, she would not have seen Mick Jagger, but since there weren’t any tall people around at the concert, if she had been at the concert, she would have seen Mick Jagger.

To which extent are counterfactuals context-dependent? Lewis suggested that we can do without a systematic dependence on context by combining an invariant similarity relation with a variably strict analysis of counterfactuals. Recently, this approach has been challenged partly by drawing attention to the phenomenon of reversed Sobel sequences: sometimes it seems as if the order in which two counterfactuals are uttered makes for a difference in truth-value. Philosophers who take this phenomenon to be semantic in nature have reacted to it by allowing the similarity relation to vary from context to context (for instance, have a look at von Fintel’s semantics for counterfactuals, which you can find here). In this note, I’d like to challenge the semantic analysis of reversed Sobel sequences by arguing that it does not square well with a plausible link between “would”-counterfactuals and “might”-counterfactuals.

Here is the phenomenon. In an initial context, the counterfactual

(1) If she had been at the concert, she would have seen Mick Jagger

may be truly asserted, or so it is assumed. Subsequently, the counterfactual

(2) If she had been at the concert and got stuck behind a group of tall people, she would not have seen Mick Jagger

may be accepted, too. All this is to be expected on Lewis’s account: strengthening the antecedent is not a valid rule of inference. But now suppose that (1) and (2) are uttered in reversed order: it seems that asserting (1) after (2) is not o.k. There is something odd about saying

(3) If she had been at the concert and got stuck behind a group of tall people, she would not have seen Mick Jagger, but if she had been at the concert, she would have seen Mick Jagger.

So, can the order in which these counterfactuals are uttered affect their truth-values?

 Posted by Moritz.

There is a plausible link between “would”-counterfactuals and “might”-counterfactuals. We can capture it with the following principle:

(M) A counterfactual of the form “If A had been the case, B would have been the case” is assertable just in case “If A had been the case, B might not have been the case” is rejectable (if A is taken to be possible).

On Lewis’s account, there is a straightforward explanation for this: the former “would”-counterfactuals are true just in case the latter “might”-counterfactuals are false. To put it another way, “might”-counterfactuals are duals of the corresponding “would”-counterfactuals.

Now, in order for the phenomenon of reversing Sobel sequences to get off the ground, one really needs the fact that (1) is assertable in the initial context. Given (M), this requires that 

(4) If she had been at the concert, she might not have seen Mick Jagger (because she might have been stuck behind a group of tall people)

can be rejected. But in the circumstances most naturally associated with the example, (4) cannot be rejected. This suggests that (1) wasn’t really assertable in the first place. Perhaps it seemed o.k. to assert it because one did not think of the possibility that she might have got stuck behind tall people. Plausibly, if the standards of assertability are low, a counterfactuals passes these standards if most of the close antecedent-worlds are consequent-worlds. But once certain possibilities are mentioned, the standards of assertability are raised, and beeing close to the truth isn’t good enough any longer. 

Note that the picture changes if (4) can be rejected. Suppose it is known that there weren’t any tall people around at the concert. Then (4) can indeed be rejected and (1) is indeed fully assertable in the initial context. But then it doesn’t seem clear to me that (3) would not be o.k. Perhaps the following utterance would lack a decisive point, but from a semantic perspective it seems fine:

(3′) If she had been at the concert and got stuck behind a group of tall people, she would not have seen Mick Jagger, but since there weren’t any tall people around at the concert, if she had been at the concert, she would have seen Mick Jagger.

In my introductory essay, I remarked that history can turn on a coin. Franz Urban could have easily avoided making his fatal mistake of June 28^th, 1914, or he could have made a completely different error altogether. Simply by going the right way, or making a wrong turn into another street, he could have saved the life of the archduke, and perhaps Europe could have been spared World War One. Or Europe could have plunged itself into flames anyway, the war beginning on a different day with a different spark and a different set of national alignments. We don’t know for sure, but the possibilities are certainly intriguing.

To speculate on all these possibilities is to step into the arena of counterfactual history. History is the tale of what happened; counterfactual history is the story of what could have happened – how a historical event could have taken place in another way and what repercussions this would have had. It is a relatively new, and much-maligned, area of historiography, and I intend to demonstrate here that it has considerable utility and most definitely does not deserve all the scorn poured upon it over the years.

Counterfactualism in history is not new. Roman historian Tacitus mused about Germanicus, Augustus’ son and the able general who picked up the pieces after the devastating Roman defeat in the Teutoburg Forest, living a full life; he actually died in AD 19, aged just thirty-four under somewhat controversial circumstances. More recently, in 1907, the renowned Whig historian G.M. Trevelyan produced an essay revolving around a Napoleonic victory at the Battle of Waterloo. Later in the century, no less a luminary than Sir Winston Churchill dabbled in the topic, wondering in one of his writings how the world would have turned out if Confederate General Robert E. Lee had beaten his Union counterpart Meade at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1862. Unfortunately, the work in which this contribution appeared, If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931), was the last significant text on counterfactual history to appear for the next six decades.

The revival of the medium began in 1991, when the Cambridge sociologist Geoffrey Hawthorn published Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences, which evaluated a number of counterfactual scenarios, including the Black Death and the Korean War. This work helped inspire Niall Ferguson’s Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, in 1997, and since then counterfactual history has been gaining both increased popularity and increased academic acceptance.

At roughly the same time, the genre of alternate history fiction saw a renaissance of its own, which no doubt aided the cause of counterfactual history. Robert Harris’ bestselling Fatherland (1992), set in a world where Nazi Germany won World War Two, is often cited today as one of the seminal works of this genre, and there is no doubt that is impact was great. Well-known American science fiction and fantasy writer Harry Turtledove was next to perpetuate the phenomenon, producing, in 1994, his Worldwar series; a sci-fi/alternate history series that postulated an alien invasion smack in the middle of the Second World War. He followed this up in 1997 with what is popularly known as the Timeline-191 series, which explored the consequences of Lee’s famous “lost orders” (Special Orders 191, hence the label) never being lost, and the Union hence losing the American Civil War. Turtledove has also produced Departures (1993) and Counting Up, Counting Down (2002), a series of short stories set in alternate history worlds – including one, intriguingly, where the Prophet Mohammed stayed a merchant and never founded Islam – along with a whole series of stand-alone alternate history novels. His most recent alternate history work is the Infamy duology, where Japan cemented its successful attack on Pearl Harbour by invading and occupying Hawaii.

There is no doubt that the success of these books has cast the spotlight on alternate history, and by extension, on counterfactual history as well. Yet this is a very recent trend; before the 1990s, counterfactual history spent six decades in the academic wilderness, mercilessly scorned by well-known historians such as E.H. Carr, who labeled it an “idle parlour game”, and E.P. Thompson, who derided it as “unhistorical shit.” In no way was it considered a serious part of the discipline, and one is moved to question: why?

We have to first consider the role of historical determinism. Simply put, determinism holds that the course of events in history has already been mapped out – as Hegel put it, “by vast impersonal forces”. In this case, there would be little point considering what could have happened instead, because all historical occurrences are pre-destined. It would be right, if this were so, to label counterfactualism an “idle parlour game”.

Unfortunately, a close examination shows that many of the most significant events in world history have been anything but pre-destined. Chance and luck have played an enormous role in determining the course of history; one of the best examples, of course, is the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. There are a good number more, the more significant including: a twenty-year-old Alexander the Great nearly dying at the Granicus, years before he gained the moniker, saved only by the timely intervention of a bodyguard; the especially wet summer of 1526 scuttling Suleiman the Magnificent’s advance on Vienna and a potential body blow to Western Christendom; and Mongol Khakhan Ogodai’s fortuitous passing in 1241 leading to a Mongol retreat from Europe, where previously they had swept all before them.

These are only some of the more famous points where history could have diverged; perhaps you could take some time and wonder at the effects, undoubtedly great, if things had gone the other way – as they so easily could have. Yet if it is this simple to show that determinism is not a viable way of examining history, why was counterfactualism spurned for so long, and is still not fully accepted in intellectual circles today?

This could be due to a poor reputation, gained due to much of the literature produced on the subject being sub-standard. Counterfactual texts may suffer from a couple of major failings: one, wish fulfillment; two, something known as the “Cleopatra’s Nose” phenomenon.

Wish fulfillment is, as the name implies, a case where the writer creates a counterfactual scenario to fulfill personal conscious or unconscious desires, or to perpetuate a personal agenda. This in itself is not exactly harmful, but it often results in the projection of an extremely far-fetched counterfactual scenario. An early example would be French author Louis Geoffroy’s 1836 work, Histoire de la Monarchie universelle: Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1812-1832) (Napoleon and the Conquest of the World) – a title that is self-explanatory. Geoffroy took a reasonable premise – that Napoleon had not marched on Moscow in 1812, but instead pursued, challenged and defeated the army of Tsar Alexander – and turned it into a timeline that borders on pure fantasy. As Adam Zamoyski relates, the victory over Russia was followed by an invasion of Britain, the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the conquest of Asia and Africa, such that by his death in 1832, Geoffroy’s Napoleon ruled the world (Zamoyski, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow, 2004). Clearly, Geoffroy was reacting to France’s fall from European hegemony after Napoleon’s abdication in 1814 and final defeat at Waterloo in 1815; his reaction, apparently, was to retreat into a fantasy universe where France ruled a world empire. This might be an extreme example, but it does show mankind’s boundless imagination and how serious writers of counterfactual history would do well not to let their emotions rule their work. Counterfactual scenarios as the one above, or works of alternate history fiction which perpetuate such far-fetched scenarios, create a bad name for counterfactualism in general.

The other problem we have to examine is intriguingly named the “Cleopatra’s Nose” phenomenon, where relatively insignificant details are postulated to cause huge changes in the course of history. This way of thinking gets its name from a popular theory that had Cleopatra lacked natural beauty (i.e. for instance, had an uglier nose), Mark Antony would not have been smitten by her, would not have been distracted by his love and would have crushed Octavian in the Roman civil war – thus thoroughly changing the course of Roman, and by extension, Western history.

Perhaps you can already spot the way in which this scenario is problematic. It is highly possible that Cleopatra could have turned out ugly (in fact, it has been suggested from archaeological evidence that she was not the beauty she has often been said to be), but it does not then follow that without her distracting influence, Mark Antony would have won the civil war and become ruler of the Roman Empire; notice how Octavian is distinctly underrated, reduced to the status of a non-entity, in the above description? It is then a highly questionable hypothesis.

We can thus see, from the above laughable hypotheticals, that good counterfactual history also demands an element of logic. We can imagine with a good degree of plausibility that Napoleon had succeeded in his invasion of Russia in 1812, but to go on to say that he would take this victory as a stepping stone to world conquest is going too far. We can envisage a hypothetical Muslim victory at Tours in A.D. 732, but it would be difficult, to say the least, to see how this could have led to the “dreaming minarets of Oxford” which Edward Gibbon fantasized about. We can gaze over half-a-century’s distance and say that Hitler would have won the war had he advanced through North Africa instead of launching Operation Barbarossa, but there are problems with this scenario as well. Like any good historian, a counterfactual historian must examine the available evidence and come up with a reasonable viewpoint. If he wants to make a bold assertion, he has to back it up, even though his assertion is hypothetical. The only good counterfactuals are plausible ones.

It is therefore easy to see how counterfactual history can be useful. By considering a number of alternative scenarios, one can better understand the root causes of a particular historical event. For example, there are many competing theories regarding the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which ascribe it variously to divergent occurrences. By taking each major occurrence, and considering the effect (or lack thereof) if it had not occurred (or had not occurred in the manner it did), the relative importance of all these factors can be weighed. If the vast barbarian migrations had not occurred, or occurred on a much smaller scale, might Rome have survived? If the Empire had an abler hand at the helm during these dark years of invasion and internal strife, could it have weathered the storm? By considering “what if”, we will be able to gain a clearer picture of “what was”.

Even more importantly, counterfactualism reveals the important role of chance in history, and throws into question our assumption that certain historical events were somewhat inevitable. The simplest example is the Second World War. The Allied victory and Axis defeat is virtually taken for granted today. Yet the Axis had numerous chances, if not quite for victory, then at least for dealing crippling blows which would have made Allied recovery far more difficult. Hitler, for reasons still obscure today, ordered his panzers to halt in front of the beaten, bewildered British Expeditionary Force being taken off at Dunkirk – if he had allowed them to continue, in the flush of victory over France, Britain would have lost most of its regular army. As it was, the British had to leave behind most of their heavy equipment, but managed to rescue 300,000 soldiers to form the core of a brand new citizen army. Could Britain have recovered and remained an active partner in the rest of the war if it had lost these 300,000 combat veterans in the summer of 1940?

One-and-a-half years later on the other side of the world, the Pacific Fleet’s aircraft carriers were to escape destruction at Pearl Harbour by sheer good fortune. Out to sea on the morning on December 7^th, 1941, the fleet’s most important ships (although perhaps no one realized that at the time) survived the Japanese surprise attack that killed over 2,000 Americans. In addition, the Japanese failed to strike the oil storage tanks at the waterfront; urged to launch a final wave for this purpose, the cautious Japanese commander Admiral Chuichi Nagumo hesitated. He was to decide, erroneously, that enough damage had been done to the American war effort and order his ships to turn for home. What if he had not? What if the carriers had been in port and had been lost? Without carriers or oil stocks, an American recovery in the Pacific would have been far harder.

Yet, astonishingly, this is not the greatest stroke of luck the Americans had in the Pacific War. That was to come in arguably its decisive battle: Midway. With three fleet carriers against Japan’s four, and no aircraft superior to the then-devastatingly effective Japanese Zeros, the odds were weighed against the US Pacific Fleet. And so it seemed for most of the battle, as American airstrikes crumbled in the face of superior Japanese fighter patrols. The Japanese had, of course, launched strikes of their own, and their aircraft needed to refuel and restock ammunition. It was during one of these lulls, at an exact fortuitous moment, that the skies cleared and American torpedo bombers happened to be overhead. Without the combat air patrols – currently being refuelled – which had performed so superbly up till then, the Japanese could only throw up flak and hope; in vain, as it turned out. Within ten minutes, three Japanese carriers were ablaze; helped by the vast quantities of munitions on their decks, ready to be loaded into waiting aircraft. The fourth carrier was caught and sunk the next day. The Japanese lost 4 fleet carriers and 228 aircraft; with the planes went some of her best pilots. It was the turning point of the Pacific War, and it was all due to chance. The Japanese had the advantage of numbers and quality – it was they who would likelier have won the battle, if not for this extraordinary turn of fortune for the Americans. A Japanese victory at Midway would have certainly meant, at the very least, a far harder climb to victory for the Americans.

The inevitability of history is thus a fallacy. By recognizing how much of a “close-run thing” (Wellington, after Waterloo) it can be, we will have a more accurate view of the event in question. Misleading perceptions can be gotten rid of – perceptions that often come by because history is almost always written by the victors. A more holistic, fairer picture of the event in question emerges. What is more, good knowledge of the subject at hand is need to postulate plausible counterfactuals; to prove a scenario, one needs to research on the events, personalities, trends and figures of the period, and in doing so he will gain an increased understanding of this period or event he is looking at.

Counterfactuals by themselves can also have the effect of triggering debate on the subject. If a scenario is found implausible, proof must be presented. In seeking this proof, new evidence could come to light which completely changes popular perceptions. The benefits of a civil discussion on the subject will accrue to all – it could turn out, eventually, to be a very useful learning experience for everyone concerned. Even implausible counterfactuals can aid in this area, albeit indirectly – by meticulously going through these fantastical scenarios, a student of history can learn how to spot fallacies and other undesirable devices of argument, and thus to avoid them in his own works.

Thus, in conclusion, we can see that counterfactual history is most definitely more than an “idle parlour game”. It has some very real uses, and should definitely be regarded as a respectable area of academic study. It enables one to take a far broader, fairer and less biased view of history, and clears up the many misconceptions and inaccuracies prevalent within popular history. With such benefits, there is absolutely no reason to continue to decry and overlook this vital area of the discipline.