Argument

In CF, an argument is a piece of reasoning offered for or against an IGC. Arguments come in two kinds, positive and negative, and are further classified as decisive or indecisive.

CF's four-way classification

	Positive	Negative
Decisive	contradicts "IGC false"; rare/impossible	contradicts "IGC true"; refutes
Indecisive	doesn't refute or decisively prove	doesn't refute; counts as nothing

CF accepts negative decisive arguments (refutations) as the workhorse of rational discourse. Everything else is either inaccessible or has no evidential weight in CF.

What arguments are not

• A bare assertion is not an argument. You must give reasons.
• An appeal to authority is not a CF argument — see appeal-to-authority.
• An argument is not a "weight" or "score". Arguments either refute an IGC or they don't.

"Decisive arguments are better than indecisive arguments, and most or all of our decisive arguments are negative." — criticalfallibilism.com