Talk:Dichotomy

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The history of this page is kind of funny. But I dont like the phrase "wikipedia is not a dictionary". What is wikipedia? Wikipedia is a compendium of knowledge.

[edit] Lang stub?

Why is this a lang-stub? I don't see anything about applicable to languages. Is there a missing section on the term dichotomy as it applies to languages?

[edit] Examples

Maybe some examples would be good. Or if there are no simple examples, it could be stated so, and explained why. Just a suggestion, I can't tell what a dichotomy is from the page, so I can't provide any examples myself.

Ok, I just read the German article "Dichotomie", which is done somewhat better, and added a paragraph explaining the definition so also normal people will understand it, converted the enumeration of the various uses into a list for easier reading, and added an examples section - where I'm still not really sure what are good examples. Seems they always need some sort of explanation along them, which I'm too lazy to work out right now.

[edit] non-overlapping

I removed the words "non-overlapping", which appear to be redundant: if two conditions are mutually exclusive, mustn't they also be non-overlapping? — Dan | Talk 04:58, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] definition

"either" in the first sentence should be "neither", should it not? -Adam

Definitely. Someone who had no understanding at all of what the sentence said thought that "neither" was an ungrammatical double negative and changed it to "either". I've rephrased it. Michael Hardy 21:27, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Is there any chance of putting in an average joe example? Dumb people need smarts too you know :p I recall the phrase 'Microsoft Works' is an oxymoron, and in fact the only reason I ever heard dichotomy was because I played Diablo 2 but it's like a whole load of other words I never look up in any dictionary because I figure dictionaries are full of too much opinion. Words change, and their meanings depend on the people who use them. I guess what we really need to do is add dictionaries to games i.e. GTA 4. They could change the tag line to 'seek your fortune, destroy a city, improve your vocabulary and get revenge!'. It's perfectly plausible that he could hijack a book mobile at some stage, maybe read clockwork orange and have an epiphany of some kind... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.100.51.85 (talk) 23:40, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Theology

I added the theological definition of dichotomy to the listing of definitions. meng.benjamin March 27, 2006 16:34 EST

[edit] Merge with Binary opposition?

Merge with Binary opposition?--BMF81 22:41, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Minor sentence correction

Refer to the sentence: "In biology, a dichotomous key divides a set of organisms into two groups smaller groups, typically based on a single characteristic present in exactly one of the groups."

The phrase in red should be into two smaller groups, shouldn't it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.7.147.78 (talk) 10:25, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Introduction

I think the introduction needs the inclusion of subdivision as a type of dichotomy. That is Dichotomies can be split into two types of dichotomies, opposites and complements (subdivision creating subsets). e.g.

In this image, the universal set is represented by the border of the image, and the set A as a disc. This image illustrates the complement of A in U, the additional complement, Ac which contains elements unique to U in this set operation -Subdivision e.g. Whole/part, between/within etc

Illustration of a dichotomy with two separate circles. - Opposites e.g. Yes/No Up/Down etc

The subdivision example is probably best described as complementarity. http://pages.prodigy.net/lofting/dicho.html has some information on opposites vs complementarity. --Zven (talk) 02:46, 9 June 2008 (UTC)