Fiction and Imagination: Introduction

Abstractly speaking, counterfactuals, thought experiments, and scientific models seem to be utterly different phenomena. First, counterfactuals are those conditionals whose antecedents are false, for they describe situations that are merely possible, or even impossible. Second, thought experiments are mental experiments performed both in philosophy and in natural sciences that, instead of relying on concrete actual procedures ultimately grounded upon observations, merely rely on hypothetical considerations. And third, scientific models are patterns, sometimes made of actual things—consider Rutherford’s model of the atom, or the three-dimensional eliocentric model of the Solar System that has inspired that model—which, qua props that are proxies of the intended reality to be studied, simulate or idealize the behavior of the concrete items constituting that reality. Yet appearances notwithstanding, there is a family resemblance among such phenomena.