The Value of Counter-factuals
Kevin Drum has an interesting post on why the Sixth Amendment is more important than the Second. I haven't really thought about this question, but I don't have a problem with anything in his argument, nor is that the topic of this post.
The comments to Kevin's post got a little sidetracked, as comments sections are known to do, but moved in an interesting direction. Even I joined in when the discussion turned to the hypothetical situation in which America's military tries to takeover the country (an absurd possibility to my mind, I've yet to see a realistic explanation for how or why this might happen). This got me thinking about the value of hypotheticals generally, which reminded me a bit of Volokh's piece on slippery slope arguments, and finally led me to the question I want to raise in this post (finally, the reader says), which actually has nothing really to do with Calpundit's post in the first place.
How valuable are counterfactuals (i.e. alternate history hypotheticals) in an argument? It seems to me that they are used pretty often in common discourse and probably less so by academics. The first one that comes to mind was this joke during the latest Iraq war:
An American says to a Frenchman, "Do you speak German?"
The Frenchman responds, "No."
The American says, "You're welcome."
So the point you're supposed to take is that if America hadn't entered the war, Germany would have conquered Europe and France/England/etc would have disappeared forever. Now I support and accept the broader theme, which is that American intervention has not always been unwelcome by the French, and perhaps they ought to remember that.
But the method of argument, the counterfactual, bothers me a bit. First off, it is non-falsifiable. I can't prove that Germany wouldn't have permanently occuped France, but you can't prove that it would have.
To my mind, this is a rather fatal flaw all by itself: forgivable perhaps in meaningless rhetoric, but not in a real debate. Yet the real problem I have with counter-factuals is that they are almost always tremendous over-simplifications of complex situations. Staying with the Nazi Europe counter-factual, even the basic assumption that Germany would have won the war without American intervention is an easily contestible claim. Then there'd be the Cold War that never happened. That might have some hard-to-predict ramifications.
So my question is simply this: why do people resort to counterfactuals so often? Is it because we like non-falsifiable oversimplifications?
