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Notes
Cf. also Ingram, 2023.
In hindsight, my pictorial “flow chart” did make it seem that the “Models” included the semantic component; let me now say that I regret the implication!
Cariani, 2021 attempts to give us another: that will is a modal, but “selectional”, not quantificational. Ultimately, however, Cariani’s selectional semantics can be seen as a notational variant on the universalist proposal; see Willer, 2022 and Todd (forthcoming). This is, of course, not an objection to Cariani’s proposal!
A comparison: consider “Jones is bald.” Now, say that on some admissible ways of “precisifying” the cutoff between being bald and non-bald, Jones is bald, but on other such ways, Jones isn’t bald; the supervaluationist thus proposes: “Jones is bald” is true iff no matter where the cutoff lays (that is, according to every admissible precisifiction of “bald”, which gives us a cutoff between bald and non-bald), Jones is bald. This contention does not commit the supervaluationist to the implausible claim that there is a universal quantifier somewhere in the logical form of “Jones is bald”. Similarly: the supervaluationist says that there is nowhere a quantifier over histories in the logical form of “There will be a sea-battle tomorrow” – whereas modal views of will of course say that there is.
A bivalence-friendly variant (cf. Barnes and Cameron 2009): then it is either true or false, but it is indeterminate which.
NB: in Chap. 2, I suggested that my modal semantics were in an important sense “neutral”, and part of this neutrality consists in the following observation: the noted supervaluationist package – on which will is a tense – appears empirically equivalent to a slightly different one: ‘Will’ is a universal quantifier over every available history, and in an indeterministic context, only one history is available, though it is indeterminate which it is. The key observation: given a modal view of will, we can replicate the behavior of will as a tense simply by defining the availability relation so that, given Model II – which the supervaluationist needs anyway – it only ever gives us a single history; even if will were a modal, in that case, it would behave exactly as a tense – one that simply takes you forward in the sole available history. It is in this sense that I contend that the supervaluationist can adopt my modal semantics; they’ll simply say that the universal quantification over all the available histories is an idle wheel. That idle wheel would start spinning, however, if we dropped Model I or II in favor of Model III.
As Rubio notes, however, he can preserve LEM for the tense-less fragment of the language; see Rubio, 2019: Ch. 4.
For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I would like to thank Brian Rabern, Andrew Bailey, Alan Rhoda, and Daniel Rubio. I am grateful to Andrei Buckareff for his excellent work in organizing this symposium.
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Todd, P. Book symposium: Patrick Todd, The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 224 pp. $80.00. Int J Philos Relig 95, 225–231 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-024-09915-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-024-09915-3