Fabrizio Cariani, "The Modal Future: A Theory of Future-Directed Thought and Talk" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
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What is the central claim of Cariani’s asymmetric semantics for ‘will’?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Fabrizio Cariani, professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland at College Park. His book, The Modal Future, A Theory of Future-Directed Thought and Talk, is just out from Cambridge University Press. What does the word will mean? A standard view is that it is a tensed mirror image of the word was.
and that the truth conditions of past and future sentences, for example, he was late to the event, he will be late to the event, are symmetric. In the modal future, Kariani argues against this tense-based view in favor of an asymmetric semantics, in which the word will has more in common with the word would, and other modal terms and in which future directed discourse is close kin to counterfactual discourse, not past discourse. Karajani defends an extended version of Stalnaker's selectionist semantics to explain his semantics of will and considers how his view intersects with issues in speech act theory, the metaphysics of time, and the possibility of knowledge about the future. Let's turn to the interview.
Hello, Fabrizio Cariani. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
Hi, Carrie. Thank you for having me, and thank you for inviting me.
Yeah, so I'm very excited to be talking about your book, The Modal Future, because me, personally, I mean, I haven't been able to talk about future contingents since talking about Aristotle's sea battle in... in graduate school and probably not much after that. So before we get into the details of your book, could you give us a bit of a background about your interest in philosophy and then how you came to write the book?
Yeah, that sounds good. So I think of my intellectual trajectory as having had three transformations. So I obviously I'm from Italy and I went to college wanting to do continental philosophy. In Italy, when you enroll in college, you have to choose your major right away. And so I wanted to do philosophy. I wanted to study Nietzsche. And then by the end of my time in college, I wrote an undergrad thesis on Frege's philosophy of mathematics. So I kind of traversed the entire spectrum of the discipline. But then my last year, I visited Berkeley and I got to meet some people there and they told me I should apply to their logic program. So I applied to the logic program. When I finished, I got in. And so then I became something of a logician for a while.
But then I had another kind of transformation in grad school, where from logic, I shifted over progressively to the philosophy of language. I still have great interest in the philosophy of mathematics and logic, but I would say that I'm most known in the profession as somebody who works in philosophy of language. And so that's kind of how I traversed the field as a philosopher, basically. The way the book grew was I felt... So my PhD is from 2009, and I felt that I kind of, at some point, mastered the ability to write a paper that I consider publishable. Of course, the referees don't always agree. At least I got to a point where I knew if I had an idea how to package it to put it in a journal. But I also was realizing that I had some ideas that didn't fit in a journal-sized sort of capsule.
And so the way the book grew was that as I was teaching some of this material, I realized that to make some of the points that I wanted to make, I needed to tell a longer story. And I needed to not just presuppose some common ground with my readers the way one would in a journal article and then advance a little, but actually try to rewrite some of the common ground and some of the history.
Okay.
And so that's why in my mind this grew to be a book-length project.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central claim of Cariani’s asymmetric semantics for ‘will’?
0:01–8:01
2
How does Cariani’s view connect the meaning of ‘will’ to modal terms like ‘would’?
8:01–15:39
3
Why does the ‘zero‑credence problem’ challenge a purely quantificational future semantics?
15:39–24:10
4
What is the selectionist (Stalnaker‑style) semantics that explains future‑directed statements?
24:10–31:44
5
How does the book’s approach link future discourse to counterfactual reasoning?
31:44–40:13
6
What are the implications of an open‑future vs. closed‑future metaphysics for the meaning of ‘will’?
40:13–49:39
7
How does Cariani explain the role of mental simulation in future‑cognition?
49:39–59:28
8
What is the ‘Nylon puzzle’ about future‑vs‑past assertions and why is it significant?
59:28–1:07:03
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