The human imagination remains one of the last uncharted terrains of the mind. This accessible and original monograph explores a central aspect of the imagination, the creation of counterfactual alternatives to reality, and claims that imaginative thoughts are guided by the same principles that underlie rational thoughts. Research has shown that rational thought is more imaginative than cognitive scientists had supposed; in The Rational Imagination, Ruth Byrne argues that imaginative thought is more rational than scientists have imagined. People often create alternatives to reality and imagine how events might have turned out "if only" something had been different. Byrne explores the "fault lines" of reality, the aspects of reality that are more readily changed in imaginative thoughts. She finds that our tendencies to imagine alternatives to actions, controllable events, socially unacceptable actions, causal and enabling relations, and events that come last in a temporal sequence provide clues to the cognitive processes upon which the counterfactual imagination depends. The explanation of these processes, Byrne argues, rests on the idea that imaginative thought and rational thought have much in common.

1 The Counterfactual Imagination 1 Imagination 2 Summary 14 2 Imagination and Rational Thought 15 Rational Thought 16 Rational Thought and Imaginative Thought 30 The Rationality of the Counterfactual Imagination 38 Summary 40 3 Imagining How Actions Might Have Been Different 43 "If Only ..." Alternatives to Actions 43 Clues from Reasoning: Counterfactual Conditionals 48 The Rational Imagination: Why People Imagine Alternatives to Actions 52 Summary 66 4 Thinking about What Should Have Happened 69 People Say "If Only ..." about What Should Not Have Happened 69 Clues from Reasoning: Inferences about Obligations 74 The Rational Imagination: Why People Focus on Forbidden Fruit 87 Obligations and Domain-Specific Possibilities 92 Summary 97 5 Causal Relations and Counterfactuals 99 The Focus of Counterfactual and Causal Thoughts 100 Clues from Reasoning: Strong Causal and Enabling Relations 106 The Rational Imagination: Why Counterfactual and Causal Thoughts Differ 118 Summary 126 6 "Even If ..." 129 People Imagine Semifactual Alternatives 130 Clues from Reasoning: "Even if ..." Conditionals and Inferences 137 The Rational Imagination: Imagined and Semifactuals and Causality 145 The Hidden Possibility 149 Summary 155 7 The "Last Chance" 157 People Focus on Recent Events 157 Clues from Reasoning: The Case of "Only If" Conditionals 158 The Rational Imagination: Why People Change Recent Events 167 Summary 179 8 Individuals and Creative Thoughts 181 Individual Differences in Imaginative Thoughts 182 Creative Thoughts 190 Summary 196 9 The Idea of a Rational Imagination 197 Reality and Other Possibilities 198 The Rationality of the Counterfactual Imagination 208 Summary 214

Professor Ruth M.J. Byrne is Vice Provost of Trinity College, Dublin University, Ireland.

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