Teaching the Truth Table for the Material Conditional: Overcoming the Stipulation Problem

Enden, Lars; Prentice, Noah

Teaching Philosophy

Volume 48, Issue 3, September 2025

Lars Enden, Noah Prentice

Pages 395-413

Teaching the Truth Table for the Material Conditional
Overcoming the Stipulation Problem

As every teacher of introductory logic can attest, it is a significant challenge to get students to accept the truth table for the material conditional. The main sticking point is that students can be reluctant to accept that a material conditional is true whenever its antecedent is false. In this paper, we examine some popular strategies for teaching the truth table for the material conditional. Ultimately, we find them all lacking because they all rely—in one way or another—on stipulating that the truth table is correct. We argue that stipulation is a less than ideal way to teach the truth table for the conditional, and we, therefore, recommend a new strategy that actually shows students why the material conditional is true when its antecedent is false.

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