Hypotheticals

Hypotheticals are situations, statements or questions about imaginary rather than real things. Hypotheticals are all about "what if?" (Grammatically, hypotheticals is a substantive use of the adjective hypothetical, normally only in found in the plural. The word is plural because it refers to the members of a class of hypothetical things.)

Examples of hypotheticals are:

• situation – your bank makes you 100 times richer, just for fun;
• statement – if I was very rich, I would give all my money to Wikipedia;
• question – if you were the richest person in the world, what would you do?

Hypotheticals are very important because they are the way we talk about what we would do if the world was different. Sometimes this helps us protect ourselves against risks in the future. Sometimes this helps us plan and create a new and better future.

Hypotheticals are not just about the future, that is just the easiest way to see how useful they are. Hypotheticals about the past may sound strange, but they can be very useful too. Hypotheticals about the past help us work out how things work. For example, if we want to understand why a war started we might ask, "What if the two sides talked more first? Would they have worked out a better way of solving their problems than fighting?" Hypotheticals about the past are challenging to think about, because we can't go back into the past to change things and see exactly what would happen.

A philosopher who specialized in logic, called David Lewis, wrote a book called Counterfactuals (Blackwell Publishers, 1973). In that book he suggested that when we use hypotheticals ("counter-to-fact-uals"), what we mean is, "In an imaginary world, exactly like ours, except in the one difference we are talking about, ...". We don't say all the extra words because it is too long and boring, but basically that's what we mean.

This idea is often called "possible worlds" and some people believe they actually exist, only we can't get to them, because the whole point is that they are different to our world.