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What is the role of "won't have had" here? In this sentence it doesn't look like a reference to the future, although it is exactly what the will-form usually indicates. Based on the context, the action has already taken place. So I don't understand the logic behind the use of "won't have had" in this particular case.

The sentence itself:

"When Utah’s Republican lawmakers decided to clamp down on ‘pornographic or indecent’ texts, they won’t have had the Old Testament in mind."

The sentence is the headline of one of Guardian articles.

Marie Mit
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    I can see that you will have fallen into one of the recurring and gaping gaps in how the English modal auxiliaries are presented to learners. :( Every modal verb has many very different kinds of use in English, and pretending that will "means the future" is one of those sad simplificational mistruths which learners are regularly saddled with. Here it means the speaker is expressing their certainty about a past event's actual occurrence. So "will have Xed" really means "surely did X". I've linked to other answers about the matter. I realize these are very hard to search for. – tchrist Jun 12 '23 at 15:13

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