ABSTRACT
Counterfactual inference plays an important role in everyday life, in science, and especially in philosophy. In relation to philosophy, the focus of the present concerns, it is clear that the aim of the enterprise is understanding. The task of philosophy, as Socrates clearly saw, is to work the way out of the thicket of inconsistency in which they are entangled by the presystemic beliefs. The long and short of aporetic cluster is that thought experimentation in philosophy is simply so much grist for the mill of a coherence analysis geared to consistency resolution of the sort at issue in counterfactual reasoning. Accordingly, the overall process that is called for a matter of cost-benefit optimization on the basis of thinking through the overall consequences of competing alternatives. And it is these types that both delineate the background against which philosophical thought experimentation proceeds and which set the stage for the reasonable-conformity deliberations required for the resolution of philosophy's aporetic problems.
