ABSTRACT
People often create alternatives to reality and imagine “what if …” and “if only …” These counterfactual thoughts are alluring in everyday thinking, e.g., “if only there had been fruit in the fruit bowl, I wouldn’t have eaten all that chocolate.” Counterfactuals implicate both imagination and reason. People rely on their imaginative skills to create many different sorts of counterfactual alternatives to reality. They rely on their reasoning skills to make many different sorts of inferences from these imagined counterfactuals. In this chapter I first consider imaginative skills. I sketch the key role of the counterfactual
imagination in human thinking. People rely on counterfactuals to explain the past, prepare for the future, modulate emotions, and support moral judgments (see Byrne 2015 for a review). I describe the influence of knowledge on the plausibility of the counterfactuals that people create and outline several alternative explanations of the cognitive processes that underlie the imagination of counterfactual alternatives. In the second part of the chapter, I consider reasoning skills. I consider several alternative explanations of how people reason with counterfactuals. I assess the psychological evidence that people envisage dual possibilities to understand and reason with counterfactuals. I conclude with the suggestion that counterfactuals provide an important bridge between reasoning and imagination (e.g., Byrne 2005). Imagination and reasoning depend on the same sorts of underlying computational processes: reasoning depends on cognitive processes that support the imagination of alternatives, and imagination depends on cognitive processes that are based on the same core processes.
