Will done Better: Selection Semantics, Future Credence, and Indeterminacy

Abstract

Statements about the future are central in everyday conversation and reasoning. How should we understand their meaning? The received view among philosophers treats will as a tense: in 'Cynthia will pass her exam', will shifts the reference time forward. Linguists, however, have produced substantial evidence for the view that will is a modal, on a par with must and would. The different accounts are designed to satisfy different theoretical constraints, apparently pulling in opposite directions. We show that these constraints are jointly satisfied by a novel modal account of will. On this account, will is a modal but doesn't work as a quantifier over worlds. Rather, the meaning of will involves a selection function similar to the one used by Stalnaker in his semantics for conditionals. The resulting theory yields a plausible semantics and logic for will and vindicates our intuitive views about the attitudes that rational agents should have towards future-directed contents.

Epistemic stance without epistemic modals: the case of the presumptive future

“…Answering this question will require one to consider and compare existing theories of the temporal future (cf. Copley (2009), Kaufmann (2005, Cariani & Santorio (2017) among others). The second question concerns the differences among presumptive uses of the future cross-linguistically.…”

Talking About Worlds*

“…In more detail, we define a selection modal ‘σ’ as follows; this generalizes proposals for the semantics of ‘will’ given in Cariani and Santorio ; Kratzer In Press. (26)[[σ(p)=[[p …”

“…22We can also look at conditionals under negative attitude verbs like ‘doubt’, as Cariani and Santorio () suggest (in a different context) and Cariani and Goldstein () suggest in arguing for CEM .…”

Fatalism and Future Contingents

“…This view preserves FEM, whilst future contingents can take a third truth value, at least in some pairs of contexts of utterances and assessments. In another vein, Cariani and Sartorio () offer a view such that its semantics for future contingents preserves the Future Excluded Middle, while maintaining a sense according to which there might be indeterminacy with respect to their present truth value. Their semantics presupposes that in case multiple futures are possible, there is a unique fully specified way things will actually be (p. 142).…”