Binary Logic is “Out” in Academia
I totally enjoyed this article by Professor Russell Jacoby about the fashion of complicating everything in academia. But here’s the point:
To defend binary thinking is to invite opprobrium. It is true that fixed oppositions between good and evil or male and female and a host of other contraries cannot be upheld, but this hardly means that binary logic is itself idiotic. Binary logic structures the very computers on which most attacks on binary logic are composed. Some binary distinctions are worth recognizing, if not celebrating: the distinction, let us say, between pregnant and not pregnant, or between life and death. Others are at least worth noticing — for example, that between a red and a green light. You either have $3.75 for a latte or you do not. Can that be “complicated”?
[…]
…Perhaps it is time to return to Ockham’s principle of parsimony, his so-called razor: “Plurality is not to be posited without necessity.” Instead we have gone in the opposite direction. The cult of complication has led — to alter a phrase of Hegel’s — to a fog in which all cows are gray.
And it all comes down to existence, which is binary. Either that $3.75 exists in your pocket or it doesn’t. And either you–who wants that latte–exists or you don’t. Either the coffee shop exists or it doesn’t. Either the latte can be made or it can’t.
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