Critical Fallibilism

Critical Fallibilism (CF) is the philosophical system, created by Elliot Temple, that this dictionary documents. It is about how to think, learn, discuss, decide, and evaluate ideas using rational methods to create knowledge and achieve goals. CF integrates three traditions: from Critical Rationalism it takes fallibilism and learning as evolutionary error correction rather than positive justification; from Theory of Constraints it takes focusing on the constraint while leaving factors with excess capacity alone; from Objectivism it takes integration and automatization of ideas through practice.

CF’s central original move is the rejection of strong and weak arguments. Ideas are judged in a binary way as refuted (a known error) or non-refuted, where an error is a reason an idea fails at a goal in a context. This rejects every degree-of-goodness measure at once: credences, probability, support, plausibility, weight, corroboration, and verisimilitude alike. The opposing tradition is justificationism, which CF holds to be a mistake even in its non-numeric forms.

To differentiate ideas without scoring them, CF gives each idea many simple evaluations rather than one complex one: it evaluates idea-goal-context triples using binary goals and breakpoints that turn analog spectrums into qualitative pass/fail distinctions. All conclusions are held tentatively. CF also treats philosophy as a secondary skill and prizes policies that enable error correction. It teaches how, not what, to think.