In the Idea of Ideas there are three types of ideas: empirical, rational, and irrational. Empirical ideas describe the material world directly, rational indirectly, and irrational not at all. While truth is alignment with reality, human knowledge is a process. The TST epistemic categories are for evaluating ideas, they’re not categories of reality itself.
Within the irrational category there are two subtypes: disproven and speculative. While disproven ideas should be let go of as personal truth, even if they continue to hold personal “pragmatic” value, speculation is different. Speculation is the wellspring of knowledge. New ideas start out as speculative until they earn a place in knowledge.
Why? It’s a matter of logic. TST adopts classical logic as part of critical-thinking. TST’s three categories are epistemic, not logical truth values. They help us evaluate our ideas while preserving a binary commitment to truth.
So, speculative ideas are only false in a logical setting. Until they are proved or disproved, they remain speculative. They have not yet earned established truth status. Within established knowledge, speculation cannot be accepted as true. And when a binary judgment is required, it is treated as false.
Classical logic is bivalent, meaning truth and falsehood form an exhaustive binary pair: if a proposition is not true, it is false. But bivalence alone does not establish whether a speculative proposition is true or false. These are the reasons why TST’s epistemic categories sit above binary logic. Binary logic is sound, but our understanding of reality requires more than binary judgments. Something philosophers have grappled with since before Aristotle’s time. This idea in TST stems from reality itself; something cannot both be true and false, at the same time, and in the same way.
