Yes or No Philosophy

Yes or No Philosophy is Temple’s claim that epistemology is fundamentally binary. You either accept an idea or you don’t, judge a criticism decisive or not, decide an idea solves a problem or not. Because action is binary — you act on one idea and reject the rivals — your thinking should mirror that. Hedging and being wishy-washy resolve nothing, since you must still pick something.

The core move is rejecting degree arguments: the practice of scoring ideas by amount of goodness, support, plausibility, or strength. Here CF parts ways with Critical Rationalism. Popper rejected positive justification but still formed critical preferences, ranking surviving ideas by how good they seem given the arguments. Temple argues this smuggles back the very weighing it disowned, leaving CR structurally close to the justificationist standard view it opposes. CF instead accepts only decisive criticism: a negative argument either contradicts an idea (so you can’t hold both) or does nothing. There is no partial survival.

This works by making goals precise. An argument that an idea is merely worse becomes useful only when converted into a reason it will fail at a stated purpose — which usually means locating a breakpoint, an amount that actually matters. So one vague “degree goal” splits into a few binary goals, each evaluated good enough or not. Temple grounds this in two claims: success is digital (error correction is digital, not analog), and one error suffices for failure, so listing an idea’s virtues never shows it lacks fatal flaws.

It opposes credences, argument strength, gradations of certainty, and the validation ladder. We act on non-refuted ideas not because they are proven, but because their only rivals carry known errors.