Pattern Matching

Pattern matching is CF’s main technique for telling your subconscious when to fire a skill or rule. Because the subconscious works best with explicit, unambiguous instructions, “I’ll know it when I see it” is a poor specification. Temple’s analogy: you are instructing an employee who needs every triggering condition written down. So you name specific patterns — when these patterns are present, do this; when they are absent, don’t — instead of relying on conscious creative judgment each time. Clear rules let an automatized skill activate consistently in the right situations and support alignment between conscious and subconscious.

CF distinguishes two modes. Exact pattern matching treats the slightest difference as breaking the pattern; it is rigorous but too brittle for messy real data. Fuzzy pattern matching accepts “good enough” fits — which forces hard, often unsolved judgments about how similar or relevant counts as enough. Temple argues these judgments are the core difficulty inside similarity and relevance and behind the problem of induction: infinitely many patterns fit any data perfectly, so no pattern is uniquely picked out by the evidence.

This is why CF, following Popper, declines to put patterns at the foundation of epistemology. Pattern matching is a useful subconscious-training tool and one more guess to evaluate — but the fundamental method is conjecture and refutation: make guesses, then seek decisive criticism of errors. Patterns are objects of reasoning, not the engine of knowledge.