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CHAPTER V: Counterfactual Narratives of the Past
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101 chapter 5 Counterfactual Narratives of the Past We have noticed that some postmodern historical fictions not only deviate from commonly known historical facts but blatantly contradict them (IV.2). Now we will discover that the counterfactual representation of the past has deeper historical roots and broader motivations than the postmodern fictional experiments indicate. Why would anybody want to imagine what did not happen but might have happened? In this chapter I explore this weird phenomenon, assess how counterfactual representations could help us understand the past, and, primarily, determine how studying them could contribute to the illumination of the central problem of this book, the relationship between fiction and history. 1. Fundamentals of Counterfactual Thinking Counterfactuals, counterfactual thinking, and counterfactual possible worlds have received much attention in the past two or three decades— in logic (Lewis 1973), in philosophy (Rescher 1973), and in certain fields of empirical enquiry, especially history (Ferguson, ed., 1997), political science (Tetlock and Belkin, eds., 1996), and social psychology (Roese and Olson, eds., 1995). Counterfactual thinking appears now as a significant part of human intelligence; it enriches reasoning by the ability of the imagination to construct nonactualized alternatives to what actually happened. Humans activate counterfactual thinking for many different reasons: to deal with negative affects arising from events or actions, to open new horizons for knowledge and understanding, to create narratives of alternative pasts, or simply to “catapult themselves beyond the muck and malignancy of the actual into the liberating realm of the possible ” (Roese and Olson 1995b, 169). There are undeniably major differences in individuals’ propensity for counterfactual thinking and in their 102 possible worlds of fiction and history preferences for certain kinds of counterfactuals (see Kasimatis and Wells 1995), but the capacity for this kind of thinking is obviously universal. Although the following example is taken from a fictional work, we could easily imagine a similar actual situation. Mrs. Janet Carpenter was murdered Monday night. The Sunday before , she had gone for confession to Father Presteign. Commander Dalgliesh wanted to interrogate Mrs. Carpenter on Monday evening, but despite inspector Kate’s objections, he put it off until the next morning. After the murder, the three fictional persons of P. D. James’s novel A Certain Justice (1997) make the following comments “If that priest had told us on Sunday everything he knew, she’d still be alive” (Kate); “If we’d gone to interview her early Monday evening, she’d still be alive” (Dalgliesh ); “If I had persuaded her to go to you immediately after she left the church, if I had insisted on accompanying her, she’d be alive today” (Father Presteign) (331). All these comments are counterfactual conditionals , expressing the perennial need of humans to ponder possible actions that might have prevented an actual event from happening or brought about a different actual event. Counterfactual thinking is invoked both in the mental stage antecedent to acting, that is, when the agents consider and assess available alternatives, and in the subsequent stage (as in our example), where counterfactuals serve to evaluate the outcome, soften its emotional impact, express regret, give praise or assign blame, and so on. It is a proper task of psychology to study the various purposes, modes, and individual differences of counterfactual thinking in human praxis. One of the psychologists’ tasks is to determine “psychological ‘rules’ that constrain people’s considerations of which events or conditions to mentally mutate. We use the term counterfactual constraints to refer to these rules. . . . Counterfactual constraints serve the purpose of restricting all possible alternatives to a practical subset” (Seelau et al. 1995, 659–60). It is important to recognize that the psychologists are not talking about rules or prescriptions for “correct” counterfactual thinking but rather about observed regularities in this mental activity, often experimentally induced. And we have to bear in mind what the skeptics (Sherman and McConnell 1995) point out: counterfactual thinking, like any other mental procedure, can be highly biased, often dysfunctional, often leading to highly unreliable conclusions. [18.207.126.53] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:39 GMT) Counterfactual Narratives of the Past 103 While the psychology of counterfactuals investigates their use in human life, the logic of counterfactual thinking strives for defining their formal structures and truth conditions. It is commonly accepted that the elementary counterfactual is a conditional statement of the form “If A had been true, then B would have been true.” An example is, “If Hitler had won the war, Germans would have settled Eastern Europe...