ABSTRACT
We saw in Chapter 2 that there are two ways for a speaker to be confident enough about the future to use a futurate. One way is to be confident that someone (the agent of the sentence or some other person) has the ability to determine whether an eventuality happens or not, and is committed to making it happen. The other is to be confident that non-accidental properties of the world entail that it will happen. These two options were reflected in bouletic and inertial orderings on a metaphysical modal base, with universal quantification over the set of worlds. Certain differences between progressive and generic futurates were taken to be aspectual in nature; others were left unexplained. A low existential temporal quantifier was held to be responsible for differences between futurate and non-futurate readings.
