How to Use counterfactual in a Sentence

counterfactual

adjective

• But so what if the show’s view of the wives is counterfactual?
  — New York Times, 3 Oct. 2021
• Barr has also sought to make counterfactual claims about the degree of force used.
  — Matt Zapotosky, Anchorage Daily News, 10 June 2020
• New counterfactual methods like LIME seem to emerge each month.
  — Paul Voosen, Science | AAAS, 6 July 2017
• But at no place is the tension higher than at Fox, which has served as platform, megaphone and cheerleading squad for Mr. Trump and his counterfactual claims for the better part of four years.
  — Ben Smith, New York Times, 27 Sep. 2020
• And the Trumpian content can at times be contradictory or even counterfactual, as in false.
  — Jim Rutenberg, New York Times, 5 June 2016
• There is also the problem that some bubbles are more counterfactual than others.
  — Lincoln Caplan, The New Yorker, 21 Mar. 2017
• In a sense, his entire œuvre could be classed as juvenalia, fit only for dismissal or could-have-been counterfactual.
  — Colton Valentine, The New Yorker, 13 Feb. 2023
• In climate world, the first act involved doing the science and conducting counterfactual experiments similar to those produced for the virus.
  — Ben Santer, Scientific American, 10 July 2020
• The speeches that most intriguingly compel reflection on the premise of counterfactual history are those written purely to ensure against the need to deliver them.
  — Priya Satia, The New Republic, 20 May 2022
• No one should allow themselves to be taken in by such counterfactual duplicity.
  — Micha Danzig, San Diego Union-Tribune, 10 Dec. 2021
• His counterfactual insistence that the situation was under control did nothing to slow the viral spread through February and early March.
  — Gilad Edelman, Wired, 25 Mar. 2020
• The desecration came just days after President Trump, at a bizarre and at times counterfactual press conference in Washington, dodged a question about recent instances of anti-Semitism.
  — Adam Davidson, The New Yorker, 22 Feb. 2017
• Regret is a negative emotion that hinges on counterfactual thinking, Dr. Roese explains.
  — Patia Braithwaite, SELF, 31 Mar. 2021
• Microsoft's credibility with the press was no higher, hurt by constant counterfactual statements and spin.
  — Dina Bass, latimes.com, 20 June 2019
• The letters invite counterfactual speculation: What if Truman had sent them?
  — Beverly Gage, The New Yorker, 7 Mar. 2022
• On June 8, Nature published two more counterfactual studies.
  — Ben Santer, Scientific American, 10 July 2020
• For instance, an inability to stop counterfactual thinking—concocting alternatives to events that have already happened—is to be expected at first, Dr. Shear says.
  — Patia Braithwaite, SELF, 2 Aug. 2019
• After years and years of counterfactual dreaming, reuniting can feel transcendent.
  — Faith Hill, The Atlantic, 15 Dec. 2022
• Of course, counterfactual history is difficult to prove.
  — Bruce Bartlett, The New Republic, 26 Feb. 2021
• That in itself would be enough to subtract 5 percentage points from fourth-quarter gross domestic product compared with a counterfactual scenario that includes an extension of stimulus measures.
  — Bloomberg.com, 22 Sep. 2020
• If only reconstructing counterfactual occurrences, as these scientists did for this protein, were as easy to do for other aspects of human history.
  — Diana Gitig, Ars Technica, 20 Sep. 2017
• Fischer doesn’t speculate, but Le Prince’s story does give a counterfactual glimpse—if not of an enduringly less rapacious, more idealistic early film industry, then at least of a longer age of innocence.
  — Nat Segnit, Harper’s Magazine , 16 Mar. 2022
• Sure, Facebook’s tendency to gobble up potential competitors or cut them off from its developer tools has probably reduced the level of innovation in the field, but who’s to say what social networking would look like in the counterfactual scenario?
  — Gilad Edelman, Wired, 9 Dec. 2020
• This careful analysis of counterfactual scenarios is run through the fictional model.
  — Jeremy Kahn, Fortune, 2 May 2023
• Yet the counterfactual scenario DiSavino invokes, in which mountain women and African-American string bands were granted their rightful, central place in early country music, is heartening to entertain.
  — Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine, 27 Apr. 2020
• Trump is no stranger to damaging his own credibility with wild, counterfactual, conspiratorial claims about any number of topics.
  — Aaron Blake, Washington Post, 19 May 2017
• This counterfactual thinking is an essential precursor for action, an element of our preparation to make decisions.
  — Forbes, 29 June 2021
• In this counterfactual world, the storm looks significantly different.
  — Scott K. Johnson, Ars Technica, 13 Sep. 2018
• These approaches try to balance mathematical fairness with practical counterfactual thinking — with results that work well in certain circumstances, but not in others.
  — Quanta Magazine, 29 June 2018
• For example, in the preprocessing stage, techniques such as Counterfactual Fairness and path-specific counterfactual methods can be used to remedy inaccuracies in the data and to ensure that the sensitive attributes do not change the output.
  — Aparna Dhinakaran, Forbes, 10 Sep. 2021

Last Updated: 4 Aug 2024