Today, I learned more about the third (or past unreal) conditional, a grammatical structure I used to teach as of more than ten years ago. It goes like this:
If I hadn't come to Ecuador, I would never have tried encebollado.
This is a counterfactual statement which tells us that a) I did come to Ecuador, b) I did try encebollado and c) my trying encebollado was contingent on my coming to Ecuador.
So far so good, here's what I added to this today courtesy of the philosophy of Luis de Molina, a 16th century Spanish Jesuit priest, jurist, economist and theologian:
In producing any counterfactual statement, we admit the possibility of other hypothetical realities. In the case above, these are the realities in which I did not come to Ecuador. The number of these realities must be infinite due to the limitless number of possible lives I could have lived outside of Ecuador.
In the statement, what we are saying is that, in no one of these hypothetical realities, did or do I try encebollado. This is patently untrue. There are any number ways to eat encebollado without coming to Ecuador, and if the number of realities where I do not come to Ecuador is infinite, I must have found some way to eat encebollado in at least one of them.
(And due to the natures of permutations and variations, if in one, then in many, most likely an infinite number, albeit a subset of the aforementioned infinite set.)
Therefore, what I must mean in making the above statement is that, of the admitted infinite number of hypothetical realities in which I did not come to Ecuador, of those which are most like the one we are experiencing, except for the stated counterfactual condition, I did or do not try encebollado.
(And, I can't help wondering, is there a line drawn between the realities sufficiently like ours to count and those which are not and, if so, where? Or is it more of a gradient of similitude, and even if so, where is it?!)
In conclusion, we have a sentence which implicitly refers to an infinite number of hypothetical realities with one specific difference from the existent one, implicitly ring-fences a group of these which otherwise resemble the existent reality, and then states something which could not happen in that reality but did in this one, or vice versa.
I think it is quite amazing that a humble 12-word sentence can make phantom realities rill out as far as the internal eye can see, only to pack them all away before we reach the full stop. It is elegant, it is tidy, and I approve of it.
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