What is a “binary cut?”

tobeirne

Sorry I missed when this term was first used, and now I’m hearing it again and again, and I don’t know what it means. #help #thankyou

Jonathan Wang

A binary has two pieces that, combined, make up the entire thing that you're talking about. So, a binary cut is the way you choose to 'cut' the whole into two pieces. Used to describe negations in the curriculum and to separate them away from opposites.

Think of it like cutting a fruit. After one cut, there's two halves of the fruit, but they don't have to be of equal size. Where you choose to make the cut determines how the halves are distributed. It's that, but for concepts. So black/not black is a different cut from dark color/light color, which is a different cut from colors of the rainbow/colors not in the rainbow, etc.