What is the main point of the passage?
Counterfactual history, the speculation about what would have happened if some event had gone differently, is sometimes dismissed as a parlour game. The dismissal is too quick. Every claim that an event caused another contains an implicit counterfactual: to say that a policy led to a famine is to say that without it the famine would not have occurred, or would have been less severe. The question is whether such judgements are made carefully or carelessly. Careful counterfactuals are disciplined: they change as little as possible, they stay within what contemporaries thought possible, and they are honest about uncertainty. They cannot tell us what would have happened, but they can show how much weight an alleged cause can bear.
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Counterfactual reasoning is unavoidable in claims about cause and can be done carefully
- Step 1: The author says every causal claim contains an implicit counterfactual and describes how to do them carefully.
- Step 2: The only choice consistent with this is "Counterfactual reasoning is unavoidable in claims about cause and can be done carefully".
Answer
Counterfactual reasoning is unavoidable in claims about cause and can be done carefully.
Why not the others: The author rejects the dismissal and denies that counterfactuals give exact answers.
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