Future statements without modality

A central problem in the philosophy of language concerns how statements about the future can be true or assertable in a world that is not yet settled. Since Aristotle’s discussion of future contingents, philosophers have worried that future-directed assertions face a tension between bivalence and openness: if the future is genuinely indeterminate, then ordinary declaratives about future events should lack a determinate truth value at the time of utterance. Contemporary semantic theories typically address this tension by appealing to modality and treating future-oriented claims as quantifying over possible futures. Against this backdrop, natural language presents a striking puzzle. In English, a present-tensed sentence like “The Lakers play the Warriors tomorrow” can describe future occurrences without any overt modal marking, while remaining perfectly assertable despite the contingency of the future.

Departing from the widely assumed modal analysis, I propose that such present future sentences are governed by a principle of causal sufficiency, which is modeled based on causal structure (Pearl 2000, Schulz 2011, Nadathur 2023). A futurate assertion is licensed just in case the described future event is sufficiently caused by presently obtaining schedules, arrangements, or lawlike regularities—facts that are extensional and non-modal in nature. On this view, present future sentences do not make claims about how the future will unfold across possible worlds; rather, they assert facts about the present causal structure that make the future event robustly expected.

Haoze Li is an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Hisresearch interest lies primarily in semantics and pragmatics, as well as their interactions with philosophy of language. He combines theoretical and experimental methods to address fundamental questions about form and meaning in natural languages.