 But now suppose there is an agent seeing to it that a fire is not started, and will only strike the match if it is wet. In this case the counterfactual  (20a)  is intuitively false. However, unless one adds the counterfactual, if the match were struck, it would have to be wet, to the background conditions,  (22c)  still follows from  (22a),  (22c), and the physical laws. That would incorrectly predict the counterfactual to be true. In short, it seems that the background conditions must themselves consist of counterfactuals. Any analysis of counterfactuals that captures their sensitivity to background facts must either eliminate these appeals to counterfactuals, or show how this appeal is non-circular, e.g., part of a recursive, non-reductive analysis.