A question in my logic class involves talking about the "if...then" connective in English and its mirror is sentential logic notation: the material conditional connective (denoted $\supset$).
The question is:
It is uncontroversial that in an “if…then” statement in English, if the antecedent is true and the consequent is false, the conditional statement as a whole is false. But for every other possible combination of truth values, there are cases in which our judgments about an English sentence don’t neatly line up with what the $\supset$ definition delivers. This suggests that “if…then” is not a strictly truth-functional expression. Provide examples that illustrate that our judgments about English “if…then” statements don’t always neatly line up with what the $\supset$ definition delivers.
I'm having a hard time finding such examples, maybe because I assumed such statements in English were truth-functional and mirroring the material conditional connective $\supset$.
Any ideas on such English connective behavior?
