Credence

A credence is a degree of belief, usually a real number between 0 and 1, expressing how confident someone is in a claim. "I'm 80% confident the meeting is at 3pm" is a credence statement.

CF rejects credences entirely. The reasons:

1. Binary evaluation is the right frame. An IGC is refuted or non-refuted; there's no in-between.
2. Adding factors fails. Credences try to combine independent reasons into a single number. CF shows this fails for different-dimensional factors (see multi-factor-decision).
3. Regress attacks the priors. Where do the prior probabilities come from? They are arbitrary assumptions made up before intelligent thinking happens.
4. Mistakes are unknown. You can't credence-adjust your way out of an unknown unknown.

What CF replaces credence with

CF uses non-refuted as the only positive status. If you don't have a decisive criticism, the IGC is non-refuted. If you do, it's refuted. There is no "70% non-refuted" state.

Confidence in the state of your own knowledge is a separate matter — and CF handles it via uncertainty and contextual meta-levels, not via credence on each IGC.

"CF explains why it's a mistake to judge how good ideas are, how weighty evidence is or how strong arguments are, or to use credences or degrees of belief." — criticalfallibilism.com