Refutation

Refutation is the single status-change CF tracks for ideas. An idea is refuted when a criticism identifies a known error against it — a reason it fails at its purpose — and non-refuted when no such error is currently known. There is no third status and no spectrum: refutation is binary, the cornerstone of CF’s Yes or No Philosophy and its inheritance from Popper’s conjecture and refutation.

CF’s distinctive move is that only refutation changes an idea’s status. Confirming evidence, accumulated support, or rising plausibility do not promote an idea, because positive justification is a myth. This rests on the logical asymmetry Popper noted: a universal claim is refuted by one counter-example yet never proven by any number of confirmations. We therefore choose non-refuted ideas — not because they are proven, but because the alternatives have known errors and it never makes sense to act on an idea you expect to fail.

Refutation is contextual and tied to a purpose: an idea refuted for one goal may stay non-refuted for another. CF further holds that all genuine criticisms are decisive — see decisive criticism — so refutation is all-or-nothing rather than a weighing of argument strengths. Crucially, refuting an idea does not exhaust your options: a small change yields an idea variant that the old criticism may not touch, which is how error correction keeps generating new candidates. This opposes any view that grades ideas by amount of support or that demands a “burden of proof” before rejection.