If: Lear’s feather and the staging of science

In ‘if’ we have possibilities. In ‘if’ we have hypotheses. In ‘if’ we have play. For literary theorists such as Bryan Reynolds, ‘if’ opens a subjunctive space of transversal movement - the possibility of both/and. For the cognitive linguistic theory of conceptual blending, ‘if’ is a space builder that prompts the listener to frame the information that follows as a blend of similar yet disanalagous identities in a counterfactual scenario - If he had been his teacher he would have hated himself.¹ For Antonio Damasio, the ‘as-if’ body loop is the simulation of the emotional and physical experience of a loved one such that our body actually experiences what we witness.² For Stanislavsky, the magic ‘if’ was the launching point for character identification - If I were in the situation of my character, what would I do?³ For science and literature, there is much virtue in if.