Abstract

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 3, pp 457 - 467 This reply to the critiques by Daniel Woolf, Cass R. Sunstein and Daniel Nolan of my book _Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History_, takes each of their contributions in turn, and reasserts the centrality to counterfactual history of positing definite, long term alternative timelines rather than a vague claim that things might have turned out differently to the way they actually did. Such alternate timelines have no claim to either truth or utility since they ignore the many possible contingencies that would most likely have taken place following the initial deviation from the real timeline of history.