FOR 1614: What If? On the Meaning, Espitemology and Scientific Relevance of Counterfactual Claims and Thought Experiments

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The significance of counterfactual or in the widest sense conditional thinking for our cognitive and practical life is overwhelming. All our planning depends on it just as much as our pervasive causal picture. We think that the effect would not have occurred without the cause; and we assess what might result if we were to choose one of the available options. However, the nature of conditional thinking is still ill understood, despite a tremendous literature.The DFG research unit "What if?" tackled its topic from the outset in an original way. In two of its projects it deals with the philosophical and linguistic foundations of the topic, on the basis of recent developments in formal epistemology ignored so far. Two other projects attend to the most explicit implementation of conditional thinking, viz. thought experiments, in philosophy, in the humanities, and in biology, which is rarely explored in this respect. The hardly treated transition to fiction is blurred; it was addressed by a project from literary studies. The research unit was rounded up by a project in the history of sciences about the intellectual era that started talking of thought experiments.The collaboration of the group led to the conviction that a better understanding of condi-tional thinking requires a much more thorough-going study of its character as a tool and of its pragmatic and psycho-social foundations and impact. This is the guiding idea of the prolon-gation of the research unit, which is strengthened to seven projects (plus one associated). Thereby it enters even more unchartered waters, also methodologically.Three projects will deal with the philosophical foundations of conditional thinking. There is a modal theoretic project investigating a dynamic notion of possibility that may provide a better grounding of conditional theorizing. There is an epistemological-semantic project exploring the epistemic dynamics in conditional discourse. A further philosophical-psychological project addresses the topic of imagination, that mental faculty that is at the bottom of conditional thinking. In linguistics as well it has become more than apparent that one must study the pragmatics of conditional discourse. This study will be undertaken in two linguistic projects, in cooperation with the philosophical projects. All of this will be complemented by a Mercator fellowship from cognitive psychology. Finally, there are two projects strengthening the psycho-social aspects of the research unit. The history of science project, amended by another Mercator fellowship, will focus precisely on those aspects, as they have been treated in the further development of the intellectual traditions investigated so far. And the project, which nominally belongs to literary studies, but is actually one in social history, engages in larger dimensions by studying the political function of counterfactual historiography in post-sovjet Russian society.