If You\u27re Not Reading This, Are Unicorns Real? The Truth Conditions of Indicative Conditionals with False Antecedents

What makes an indicative conditional true if its antecedent is false? Imagine I say to you, “If you ate the last chocolate, you’re a terrible person.” Things seem fairly simple if you really did eat the chocolate: in this case, the conditional is true if you are a terrible person and false if you are not. But what if you didn’t eat the chocolate in the first place? My paper focuses on the theory that indicative conditionals are material conditionals, and I argue that this theory deserves neither the bland acceptance nor the bitter contempt with which people so often respond to it. If indicative conditionals are material conditionals, then all indicative conditionals with false antecedents are true. This may seem absurd. However, I argue that there are at least two strong reasons to consider the theory. First, the material conditional account makes a lot of sense if we already accept the doctrine of explosion. Assume that A is not the case: explosion tells us that if A also is the case, then every possible proposition is true; so perhaps it makes sense that when A is false, the conditional ⌜A → B⌝ will be true for any B. Secondly, the material conditional account seems necessary to accommodate the highly plausible analysis of categorical statements and propositions as universally quantified conditionals. While possible-worlds semantics is a strong rival of the material conditional, it cannot accommodate this analysis of categorical statements, which may be a sign that it is not the right theory of indicative conditionals