Rational Confidence
also Confidence · Standards for Knowledge
The easy, automatic, well-grounded knowing that comes from genuine mastery of a field, which CF holds should be attainable in philosophy just as it is in naming a familiar fruit.
Rational confidence is the effortless, reliable knowing you have when you instantly identify an apple or read a scale and trust the reading. CF’s central claim is that this same quality of knowing should be available in any field, including philosophy, science, or ethics. If a field feels far harder, that gap reflects your skill level (or the state of humanity’s educational resources), not an inherent difficulty in the subject. Difficulty is relative to your own progress: what was hard for you as a child is now trivial.
This makes rational confidence a standard for knowledge rather than a feeling. Lowering the bar for some fields, accepting that you cannot really know whether you are right, sabotages progress there. The standard is met through mastery and automatization: practicing until the underlying concepts run subconsciously and free up conscious attention to build further. Persistent confusion signals a real gap to fix via skill-gap management, not a verdict on the topic.
Crucially, rational confidence is not credences or numeric probabilities, and not psychological certainty or infallible assurance. It coexists with knowing the limits of a measurement and revising on new criticism, so it aligns with contextual certainty and CF’s fallibilism. Arrogant overconfidence is its counterfeit, not its example. Temple identifies language skill as a key prerequisite: because philosophy uses words and logical connectives (“if”, “all”, “not”) as core tools, you cannot reach rational confidence about philosophy without first mastering its verbal prerequisites.