Cariani’s The Modal Future is a book about future language. At its heart is a challenge to the received symmetric picture of temporal language. Many think past tense and future auxiliaries are mirror images of each other: one simply has “later” where the other has “earlier.” The Modal Future aims to supplant this symmetric picture with an asymmetric one, where future thought and talk is modal, and explores issues in the pragmatics, epistemology, and cognition of future claims in the light of this asymmetric picture.
Cariani motivates the asymmetric picture with a dilemma. “Will” appears to have properties characteristic of modal expressions. But existing modal accounts face a variety of extremely serious problems. Take the Peircean view, where “will φ” is true at w and t if and only if φ is true in all futures that are possible at w and t. Cariani shows this view...
