--- title: "Read counterfactuals in agent explanations" slug: read-counterfactuals-in-agent-explanations excerpt: "A would-have sentence can become actual history in a retelling. Hold the stated past steady while following the imagined alternative." quickAnswer: "Locate the past circumstance the explanation imagines differently. Retain what the passage says actually happened, then read the consequence within that imagined circumstance. Carry both into your retelling: what happened, and what the explanation says would have happened otherwise. An imagined result belongs to that alternative, even when its description sounds definite. Leave any unstated part of the actual history unstated." keyTakeaways: - "A counterfactual imagines a past different from the one stated." - "The imagined premise does not replace the passage's actual history." - "A would-have result stays attached to the unreal circumstance." - "A retelling preserves the contrast without adding an actual event." publishedDate: 2026-10-24 dateModified: 2026-10-24 author: Bobby Huang cluster: A role: post status: published faq: - q: "Does would have describe something that happened?" a: "Within a counterfactual, it describes the result imagined under a different past circumstance. Read it with that circumstance attached before attributing the result to actual history." - q: "Can I infer the whole actual ending from the imagined ending?" a: "Keep to the actual ending stated in the passage. An account of what would have happened otherwise does not supply every detail of what happened." - q: "What if the passage gives no actual history?" a: "Describe only the premise being imagined and the result attached to it. Leave the unstated history open rather than constructing an actual event to contrast with them." related: - what-is-a-md-file --- An agent writes, "Had Jane Doe omitted the final paragraph, the explanation would have ended without naming the river." A later retelling says the explanation ended without naming the river. Something changed between those sentences: an imagined ending became an actual one. All explanation passages here are invented; Jane Doe is fictional too. They exist as text to read. Nothing in the passages calls for action. File endings have their own introduction in [the meaning of .md](what-is-a-md-file.md). ## Locate the unreal past premise Begin with the entire invented passage: > The final paragraph stayed in Jane Doe's explanation. Her explanation ends by naming the river. Had she omitted that paragraph, the explanation would have ended without naming the river. The last sentence asks you to entertain an omission. The first sentence has already said Jane Doe kept the paragraph. The omission is the unreal past premise: the circumstance being imagined differently from the stated history. Name that difference in ordinary words: "Imagine the paragraph had been omitted." This is a description of the thought in the sentence, not an instruction to alter Jane Doe's text. The passage remains exactly as written while you interpret it. Read all the way through the imagined sentence before retelling it. "Without naming the river" describes the ending under the omission. Detached from that premise, those words can sound like an account of the explanation Jane Doe actually kept. ## Hold the stated history steady The passage supplies two actual details: Jane Doe kept the paragraph, and her explanation ends by naming the river. Retain both while considering the unreal omission. Thinking about another past does not revise either stated detail. Suppose your first retelling is, "Jane Doe omitted the final paragraph, leaving the river unnamed." That sentence has adopted the imagined premise as history. Reread the statement that the paragraph stayed. The text explicitly places the omission outside the history it describes. A subtler retelling keeps the paragraph but says, "Her explanation ended without naming the river." This time only the imagined consequence has slipped across. The actual ending in the passage still names the river. Both misreadings can arise from remembering the vivid omission and its ending while forgetting the words that made them imaginary. Retain the full relationship in your account: the river would have gone unnamed under the omitted-paragraph premise. ## Follow the consequence within the imagined past Enter the alternative only for as long as the sentence asks. In that alternative, the paragraph was omitted. The explanation's imagined ending leaves the river unnamed. That is the consequence the agent attributes to the unreal premise. You can read that consequence without deciding whether the agent's imagined account is convincing. The immediate question is what kind of account you are reading. Its definite wording does not turn it into a report of an event. The passage does not say Jane Doe briefly omitted the paragraph and later put it back. Adding that episode would invent history to reconcile the two endings. There is no such episode in these lines: the stated past and the imagined alternative have different roles. These passages remain short quotations. [Enclosing passages with Markdown fences](markdown-code-blocks.md) concerns a different way to present a passage; how the passage is shown does not change which part is imagined. ## Preserve uncertainty that belongs to the alternative Consider another invented explanation about the same stated past: > The final paragraph stayed in Jane Doe's explanation. Her explanation ends by naming the river. Without that paragraph, a reader might have mistaken the river for the path. The actual history still concerns the retained paragraph and the named river. The imagined omission now carries a possible misunderstanding. "Might have mistaken" leaves that imagined response uncertain. Retelling this as "A reader mistook the river for the path" would turn a possibility under an unreal premise into an actual event. Retelling it as "A reader certainly would have mistaken them" would strengthen the imagined result beyond the passage's own claim. Keep the possibility where the explanation puts it: with the paragraph absent, a reader might have mistaken the river for the path. Nothing in that sentence reports a reader's actual reaction to the paragraph Jane Doe kept. The imagined response also cannot fill an unstated actual response. You have the actual text's ending, but no account of anyone reading it. Let that part of the history remain undescribed. ## Retell the contrast without adding an event You could retell the initial passage like this: > With its final paragraph retained, Jane Doe's explanation names the river at its end. The agent imagines that omitting the paragraph would have left the river unnamed. This retelling carries the actual past in one sentence and the imagined alternative in the next. Neither ending replaces the other. The words "the agent imagines" keep the would-have claim attributed to the agent's passage you read. For the second passage, the imagined part stays less definite: "The agent imagines that a reader might have confused the river with the path without that paragraph." There is still no actual reader reaction to add. If you keep your interpretation in a separate file, [names for Markdown files](markdown-file-naming.md) discusses that choice. Within your prose, retain enough of the unreal premise that the imagined result cannot drift into a bare claim about what happened. Your account reaches its stopping point when it preserves the stated history and describes the alternative as imagined. Where the passage leaves actual history unstated, your retelling leaves it unstated too. The contrast survives without acquiring an extra event. ## Where Sashmark fits Sashmark's planned desktop v1 covers reading and editing Markdown; it is in development. No AI resides within Sashmark. The intended audience has AI agents writing Markdown elsewhere.