At least since Aristotle's famous discussion of the sea-battle tomorrow in On Interpretation 9, philosophers have been fascinated by a rich set of interconnected puzzles regarding our thought and talk about the future. Fabrizio Cariani's new book The Modal Future is an important contribution to this longstanding discussion, and incorporates insights from a wide array of sources in linguistics, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. The book is at times extremely technically demanding, but the patient reader with broadly non-technical interests can usually make out the basic ideas. In this essay, I stick to decidedly non-technical themes.First a brief overview. After some preliminaries in Chapters 1 and 2, Chapter 3 articulates the linguistic case for a "modal" view of will, Chapter 4 criticizes extant quantificational accounts, and Chapter 5 develops Cariani's "selectional" alternative. 1 Chapters 6, 7, and 8, Cariani says, are the most technical in the book, and address certain problems for the basic view articulated in Chapter 5. Chapter 9 is a reprint of Cariani's paper (in Ergo) "On Predicting", and can be read in relative isolation from the rest of the book. Chapter 10 develops the "assertion problem" for views on which future contingents are neither true nor false, and Chapter 11 develops Cariani's preferred version of an "open future" view. Chapter 12 develops some themes about future cognition, and again can be read in relative isolation from the other chapters. Chapter 13 addresses a fascinating puzzle concerning knowledge of the future raised by Dilip Ninan (2022).The central narrative of the book is in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, and then in turn Chapters 10 and 11.These chapters are the focus of this essay.
I. Will as a "modal"Cariani's hypothesis is that will is a "modal" like may, must, ought, and should -and so a natural first place to begin is with the question, "what is a modal?" Unfortunately, it isn't easy to say, though Cariani ultimately ends up settling on a semantic understanding whereby modals involve what he calls "worldly displacement" (46). In advancing his case, Cariani relies heavily on data (which I lack the space to review) from Peter Klecha (2014) involving "modal subordination" -but the 1 The basics of this view were first presented in Cariani and Santorio 2018.data here strike me as inconclusive. 2 Ultimately, however, Cariani mounts an impressive cumulative case, and I am happy to grant Cariani the key claim that will is a modal.So will is a modal -again, like may and must. Now, standard lore about modals has it that they have either existential or universal force vis-à-vis some relevant "domain". For instance, He may do it means that there is some permissible world in which he does it, whereas He must do it means that in every permissible world, he does it. Well, what worlds are relevant for will? And is will an existential or a universal? Cariani's answer to the latter question: it is neither. And this is where things start getting difficult. But let's back up and review Cariani's...
