binary scientific logic
There’s something profound in humans that craves certainty, which leads to a tendency to want to view everything in binary terms. We love “yes/no”, “black/white”, “good/evil”, and detest “maybe”, “grey”, or “decent.” This has obvious political ramifications that I won’t touch on here, except to note that George Lakoff has written extensively on this topic, and has suggested that the big difference between Republicans and Democrats is their relative tendency toward binary thinking.
I wanted to point out instead that science has this tendency too! For example, many of the first analyses of remote sensing imagery classified the world into discrete land-cover classes. In my sub-field of ecology, the study of edge effects on forest ecosystems, there’s been much ink shed on trying to define the depth-of-edge influence, the distance from the edge at which all edge effects stop. Even in the study of global warming, there was originally a tendency for early atmospheric models to simply contrast the present atmosphere with a doubled-C02 world.
This binary simplicity is a necessary first step in the scientific endeavor, but it causes many problems. Mostly, the binary viewpoint obscures more subtle dynamics going on in a system, and becomes a barrier to real understanding. The solution, in almost all cases, is to admit some continuum between the two extremes. So, for example, with land-cover mapping the current buzzword is “sub-pixel classification,” which is basically just an acknowledgement that each pixel has different cover types within it, existing in various proportions. In the case of edge effects, much current research models the intensity of edge effects as a function of distance to an edge, with functions generally taking some exponential-decay shape. In global warming studies, most atmospheric models now ramp up CO2 levels under a realistic emission scenario. In all cases the continuum approach has given new analytical clarity, at the price of an abstract viewpoint farther removed from the world of everyday experience.
