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• s  going counter to the facts (usually as a hypothesis)

• Such ruminations are the purview of counterfactual history, the examination of alternative outcomes based on plausible historical scenarios.
• In any case, she says, "we don't know the counterfactual: How much worse would it have been for the CIA if Panetta was not the director?" (See the top 10 unfortunate political one .
• To help distinguish frivolous flights of imagination from penetrating insights, counterfactual historians employ two standards: THE MINIMAL-REWRITE RULE A good counterfactual .

• contrary to fact

News & Articles

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• Newsweek Dead, Everybody a Suspect
  Apportioning the blame for the death of Newsweek is a bit like assessing the counterfactual of what would happen if you resurrected the captain of the Titanic and put him in charge of pets.com with a central office in circa-2004 Iraq. The New York Times gives it a go , and it’s pretty clear that Newsweek was both utterly doomed and that Tina Brown’s herky-jerky, "party like it’s 1999" editing ...
  Aug. 5, 2013 - New York Magazine