DICHOTOMY • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Dichotomy

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/daɪkˈɑtəmi/ Listen

noun

Dichotomy n.

A cutting in two; a division. "A general breach or dichotomy with their church."

Division or distribution of genera into two species; division into two subordinate parts.

(Astron.) That phase of the moon in which it appears bisected, or shows only half its disk, as at the quadratures.

(Biol.) Successive division and subdivision, as of a stem of a plant or a vein of the body, into two parts as it proceeds from its origin; successive bifurcation.

The place where a stem or vein is forked.

(Logic) Division into two; especially, the division of a class into two subclasses opposed to each other by contradiction, as the division of the term man into white and not white.

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Etymology of 'Dichotomy'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Dichotomy" Quotes from Famous Books

... me) neither was bound to a museum catalogue nor indulged in visions either of a complete scala naturae or of an hypothetical phylogeny. He classified animals as he found them; and, as a logician, he had a dichotomy for every difference which presented itself to his mind. At one time he divided animals into those with blood and those without, at another into the air-breathers and the water-breathers; into the wild and the tame, the social and the solitary, ...

— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... and nature a characteristic of his native companions in Guiana. "The very phrase, 'Men and other animals,' or even, as it is often expressed, 'Men and animals,' based as it is on the superiority which civilised man feels over other animals, expresses a dichotomy which is in no way recognised by the Indian.... It is therefore most important to realise how comparatively small really is the difference between men in a state of savagery and other animals, and how completely even such difference as exists ...

— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... result from partial dichotomy or cleavage of the trunk axis of the embryo, and is found exclusively in connection with the skull and vertebral column. It may take the form of a monstrosity such as conjoined twins or a parasitic foetus, but more commonly it is met with as an irregularly shaped tumour, ...

— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... by prefixing the word "not"; and we may imagine that we have divided the Class first thought of into two smaller Classes, whose Differentiae are contradictory. This kind of Division is called 'Dichotomy'. ...

— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll

... to understand, that it should have been proposed to carry into ideation the dichotomy between the physical and the moral. Many excellent authors have made the domain of the mind begin in the ideal. Matter is that which does not think. Descartes, in his Discours de la Methode (4th part), remarking that he may pretend "not to have a body, and that there is no world ...

— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet