Linearism, Universalism and Scope Ambiguities

In this paper, I distinguish two possible families of semantics of the open future: Linearism, according to which future tensesentences are evaluated with respect to a unique possible future history, and Universalism, according to which future tensesentences are evaluated universally quantifying on the histories passing through the moment of evaluation. An argument infavour of Linearism is based on the fact future tense does not exhibit scope interactions with negation. Todd (2020, 2021) defendsUniversalism against this argument proposing an error theory, according to which the speakers engaged in non-philosophicalconversations implicitly assume a linearist semantics of the future. In this paper, I show that an error theory is not needed for de-fending Universalism and that the scopelessness of negation can have another explanation. The absence of a wide-scope readingof negation characterises many other linguistic constructions: counterfactuals, vague predicates, generics and plural definite de-scriptions. My main thesis is that, their considerable differences aside, these constructions have something in common: they aretrue when the predicate applies to the members of a set, false when the predicate does not apply to the members of the set and in-determinate in the intermediate cases. When negation interacts with such constructions tends to take the narrow scope readingonly. I review two types of explanations for this behaviour, one semantic and the other pragmatic. Since this explanation for thescopelessness of negation is at least as good as that of Linearism, I conclude that the argument against Universalism is ineffective.