Making Conditional Speech Acts in the Material Way

The conventional wisdom about conditionals claims that (1) conditionals that have non-assertive acts in their consequents, such as commands and promises, are not plausibly interpreted as material implications; (2) the most promising hypothesis about these sentences is conditional-assertion theory, which explains a conditional as a conditional speech act, i.e., a performance of a speech act given the assumption of the antecedent. This hypothesis has far-reaching and revisionist consequences, because conditional speech acts are not synonymous with a proposition with truth conditions. This paper argues against this prevalent view in two steps. First, it presents a battery of objections against conditional-assertion theory. Second, it argues that these examples can be convincingly interpreted as categorical assertions of material implications.