The prevailing viewpoint concerning conditionals asserts two claims: (1) conditionals featuring non-assertive acts in their consequents, such as commands and promises, cannot plausibly be construed as assertions of material implication; (2) the most promising hypothesis for such sentences is conditional-assertion theory, which defines a conditional as a conditional speech act, i.e., the performance of a speech act given the assumption of the antecedent. This hypothesis carries significant and far-reaching implications, as conditional speech acts are not synonymous with a proposition possessing (...) truth conditions. This paper opposes such a view in two steps. Firstly, it presents a battery of objections against conditional-assertion theory. Secondly, it advances the argument that such examples can indeed be convincingly construed as assertions of material implication. (shrink)

There is a profound, but frequently ignored relationship between logical consequence (formal implication) and material implication. The first repeats the patterns of the latter, but with a wider modal reach. It is argued that this kinship between formal and material implication simply means that they express the same kind of implication, but differ in scope. Formal implication is unrestricted material implication. This apparently innocuous observation has some significant corollaries: (1) conditionals are not connectives, but arguments; (2) the traditional examples of (...) valid argumentative forms are metalogical principles that express the properties of logical consequence; (3) formal logic is not a useful guide to detect valid arguments in the real world; (4) it is incoherent to propose alternatives to the material implication while accepting the classical properties of formal implication; (5) some of the counter-examples to classical argumentative forms and known conditional puzzles are unsound. (shrink)