Conjecture and Refutation

Conjecture and refutation is Popper’s account of how knowledge grows. We do not derive ideas from evidence or justify them with positive arguments; we propose them as fallible guesses, then attack them with criticism and discard the ones that fail. Ideas have no special status, authority, or proof at birth. They are improved only by error correction, not by accumulating support.

The method has two halves. Conjecture generates and varies ideas (see brainstorming and variants); refutation selects among them by finding errors. CF stresses that this is literally evolution — replication, variation, and selection of ideas — not a metaphor. It also rests on a logical asymmetry: a single accepted criticism can contradict and thereby refute an idea, while no quantity of compatible evidence can establish one, because infinitely many rival ideas fit the same data. The relationship of supporting arguments to a conclusion is merely failure to contradict, which is not positive support.

This is CR‘s alternative to induction and justificationism, which try to build ideas up from data or proof. CF inherits the framework but sharpens the refutation side. Where Popper graded ideas by how well they survived testing (forming critical preferences), CF rejects degrees: every idea is either refuted or not, and all genuine criticism is decisive. So conjecture-and-refutation in CF feeds a strictly binary verdict used to pick non-refuted ideas for problem solving.