Epistemic modals, deduction, and factivity: new insights from the epistemic future

Abstract

The epistemic future (e.g., the epistemic uses of English will) is often analyzed on a par with epistemic must. We provide novel empirical evidence from English and Romanian in deduction and factive contexts to argue that this identical treatment is not warranted. We propose a unified solution based on novel ways to (i) look at weakness in must and will and (ii) encode the factive presupposition when the complement of the factive is a modalized proposition (an interaction that, to our knowledge, has not been analyzed formally before). The account connects to existing debates on strength in necessity modals, on epistemic future and future tense, and on the embedding of epistemic (and other flavor) modals under attitudes.