Dichotomy

An example of a dichotomy is the partition of a scene into figure and ground - the letters are foreground or figure; the rest is the background.

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A dichotomy is any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts. Meaning it is the procedure in which you divide a whole into two parts, or in half. It is a partition of a whole (or a set) into two parts (subsets) that are:

• mutually exclusive: nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts, and
• jointly exhaustive: everything must belong to one part or the other.

The two parts thus formed are complements. In logic, the partitions are opposites if there exists a proposition such that it holds over one and not the othe