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
  • There is also the problem that some bubbles are more counterfactual than others.
    — Lincoln Caplan, The New Yorker, 21 Mar. 2017
  • This is the problem of trying to determine a counterfactual case.
    — Erik Sherman, Forbes.com, 31 Dec. 2025
  • For years, that counterfactual felt abstract.
    — John Hope Bryant, Time, 28 May 2026
  • And the Trumpian content can at times be contradictory or even counterfactual, as in false.
    — Jim Rutenberg, New York Times, 5 June 2016
  • 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
  • New counterfactual methods like LIME seem to emerge each month.
    — Paul Voosen, Science | AAAS, 6 July 2017
  • No one should allow themselves to be taken in by such counterfactual duplicity.
    — Micha Danzig, San Diego Union-Tribune, 10 Dec. 2021
  • That is the most relevant counterfactual available.
    — Shivaram Rajgopal, Forbes.com, 24 May 2026
  • After years and years of counterfactual dreaming, reuniting can feel transcendent.
    — Faith Hill, The Atlantic, 15 Dec. 2022
  • Researchers then run disease transmission models under both the real climate and the counterfactual and compare the outcomes.
    — John Drake, Forbes.com, 15 May 2026
  • Respondents consistently say things that are counterfactual or plainly nuts.
    — David A. Graham, The Atlantic, 10 Aug. 2017
  • Such speculations can be amusing and interesting but, like much counterfactual history, they cannot be tested.
    — Literary Hub, 19 Nov. 2025
  • Microsoft's credibility with the press was no higher, hurt by constant counterfactual statements and spin.
    — Dina Bass, latimes.com, 20 June 2019
  • 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
  • This careful analysis of counterfactual scenarios is run through the fictional model.
    — Jeremy Kahn, Fortune, 2 May 2023
  • In his counterfactual history, the United States would have sought to keep China weak, poor, and peripheral.
    — G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs, 11 Feb. 2022
  • 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
  • The iterations of these counterfactual scenarios could be endless.
    — Agustino Fontevecchia, Forbes, 13 Aug. 2023
  • 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
  • In this counterfactual world, the storm looks significantly different.
    — Scott K. Johnson, Ars Technica, 13 Sep. 2018
  • This counterfactual thinking is an essential precursor for action, an element of our preparation to make decisions.
    — Forbes, 29 June 2021
  • Ferguson, who has published a collection of counterfactual histories, is an outlier among academics.
    — Daniel Immerwahr, New Yorker, 4 Aug. 2025
  • 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
  • Health care ethicists, for example, use this kind of counterfactual reasoning to evaluate harm and benefit, asking how a patient would have fared without an intervention.
    — Jen Zamzow, The Conversation, 17 Dec. 2025
  • Now that Warner has chosen Paramount, that counterfactual vanishes.
    — Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 28 Feb. 2026
  • 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
  • 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
  • While Uber has disputed my findings on driver pay cuts and increasing profit margins, the company has declined to disclose relevant counterfactual data.
    — Len Sherman, Forbes, 6 Sep. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'counterfactual.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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