The New Yorker commented:And if Michelangelo had been Siamese twins, the work would
have been completed in half the time.The point of The New Yorker's comment is not that such counterfactuals are
false; it is more that anyone who would entertain such an idea-anyone who
would "slip" the sex or number of a given human being-would have to be
a little loony. Ironically, though, in the same issue, the following sentence,
concluding a book review, was printed without blushing:
I think he [Professor Philipp Frank] would have enjoyed both of
these books enormously.2Now poor Professor Frank is dead; and clearly it is nonsense to suggest that
someone could read books written after his death. So why wasn't this
serious sentence also scoffed at? Somehow, in some difficult-to-pin-down
sense, the parameters slipped in this sentence do not violate our sense of
"possibility" as much as in the earlier examples. Something allows us to
imagine "all other things being equal" better in this one than in the others.
But why? What is it about the way we classify events and people that makes
us know deep down what is "sensible" to slip, and what is "silly"?
Consider how natural it feels to slip from the valueless declarative "I
don't know Russian" to the more charged conditional "I would like to know
Russian" to the emotional subjunctive "I wish I knew Russian" and finally to
the rich counterfactual "If I knew Russian, I would read Chekhov and
Lermontov in the original". How flat and dead would be a mind that saw
nothing in a negation but an opaque barrier! A live mind can see a window
onto a world of possibilities.
I believe that "almost" situations and unconsciously manufactured
subjunctives represent some of the richest potential sources of insight into
how human beings organize and categorize their perceptions of the world.
An eloquent co-proponent of this view is the linguist and translator George
Steiner, who, in his book After Babel, has written:Hypotheticals, 'imaginaries', conditionals, the syntax of counter-factuality and
contingency may well be the generative centres of human speech .... [They]
do more than occasion philosophical and grammatical perplexity. No less
than future tenses to which they are, one feels, related, and with which they
ought probably to be classed in the larger set of , sup positiona Is' or 'alternates',
these 'if' propositions are fundamental to the dynamics of human feeling ....
Ours is the ability, the need, to gainsay or 'un-say' the world, to image and
speak it otherwise .... We need a word which will designate the power, the
compulsion of language to posit 'otherness' .... Perhaps 'alternity' will do: to
define the 'other than the case', the counter-factual propositions, images,
shapes of will and evasion with which we charge our mental being and by
means of which we build the changing, largely fictive milieu of our somatic
and our social existence ....Finally, Steiner sings a counterfactual hymn to counterfactuality:642 ArtifiCial Intelligence: Prospects