My thinking process gravitated to and was influenced by a class in propositional logic, which I took in ninth grade. The underlying assumption/proposition is that a thing cannot be both true and not true. For example, a thing cannot be both black AND not-black; white AND not-white.

That puts me to thinking whenever I hear statements which fly in the face of this fundamental concept. In my role as director of communications, I’m sensitive to being sure that the messages I manage are internally consistent; that they faithfully and accurately promote the “brand”; and that they logically make sense.

It has come into my head recently to try to formulate the foundations of a workable worldview by identifying some binary issues which cannot be both true and not-true. If you will, there are situations where we must choose either-or but not both.

Dichotomy: Of all possible conditions, the criteria for condition “A” exclude all other conditions.

Many “it-seems-to-make-sense-to-me” arguments which people maintain, don’t actually make sense under this kind of scrutiny. By identifying some of these dichotomies, I will discuss what I view as ridiculous conclusions which do not follow from initial assumptions or positions. (If something is condition A, then it cannot also be condition not-A.) I will then attempt to lay out a reasonable path for assessing these conclusions and their implications.

Over time, this will become a periodic series of binary choices, through which I will (eventually) collect the threads of a defensible worldview.