TITLE: Why is "material implication" called "material"?
QUESTION [13 upvotes]: Why is "material implication" called "material"? What does the word "material" imply or underline?
It seems that the term "material condition" even preferred over the term "implication", preferred also by Wikipedia.
Why? What is so special about "material" versus just "implication"?

REPLY [3 votes]: Tarski on material implication:

The logicians, with due regard for the needs of scientific languages, adopted the same procedure with respect to the phrase "if..., then..." as they had done in the case of the word "or". They decided to simplify and clarify the meaning of this phrase, and to free it from psychological factors. For this purpose they extended the usage of this phrase, considering an implication as a meaningful sentence even if no connection whatsoever exists between its two members, and they made the truth or falsity of an implication dependent exclusively upon the truth or falsity of the antecedent and consequent. To characterize this situation briefly, we say that contemporary logic uses IMPLICATIONS IN MATERIAL MEANING, or simply, MATERIAL IMPLICATIONS; this is opposed to the usage of IMPLICATION IN FORMAL MEANING or FORMAL IMPLICATION, in which case the presence of a certain formal connection between antecedent and consequent is an indispensable condition of the meaningfulness and truth of the implication. The concept of formal implication is not, perhaps, quite clear, but, at any rate, it is narrower than that of material implication; every meaningful and true formal implication is at the same time a meaningful and true material implication, but not vice versa.


Source:

Alfred Tarski, Introduction to Logic and to the Methodology of Deductive Sciences, Dover, 2013.