Partial Truth

CF’s epistemology is strictly binary: an idea is either refuted or non-refuted within an idea-goal-context triple, and there is no partial refutation (see binary epistemology). This seems to clash with ordinary talk of an idea being “mostly true” or an argument being “strong.” CF resolves the tension by translating such loose phrases rather than rejecting them, treating them as approximations that usually carry a coherent meaning under the surface.

The key move is to read degree-talk as a count over a set of relevant IGCs, not as a single statement holding a fractional truth value. “Mostly true” means many but not all of the relevant IGCs containing the idea are non-refuted; “mostly false” reverses this. “Relevant” is essential: every idea sits in infinitely many true and infinitely many false IGCs as a matter of logic, so the fraction is only meaningful relative to a representative sample we have selected for our purposes. A “strong argument” likewise becomes one that refutes a high proportion (say 80%) of the relevant IGCs; a “weak argument,” a low proportion. This keeps everything decisive and per-IGC while recovering the useful content.

This parallels the translation of positive into negative arguments (see positive vs. negative arguments): “A is good because it has trait B” becomes “alternatives lacking any solution to the problem B addresses are bad.” CF rejects genuine argument strength and gradations of certainty, and unlike Popper’s verisimilitude it posits no real metric of nearness-to-truth — only a count of binary verdicts. Temple stresses such pickiness matters mainly when discussing epistemology itself or when a conversation is stuck; elsewhere, failed translation is a signal that the original claim was actually mistaken.