Lars,

I wish I had seen your response before I saw Rob's above to which I will paste and expand on.

You make an excellent point here - do we need them? (dualisms and reductionism?) - If you come acroos any writings about this send them my way. But this is what I said above. Apologies for a half paste response:

"Framed through the lens of evolution, binary thinking is simplistic indeed and was indeed a necessary survival mechanism. I think I can write a whole book on the topic though my specific scholarly interest was bounded by works in a cultural and historical context, philosophical dualism as alluded to in the works of Nietzsche and Foucault, and from a linguistic side thinkers like Derrida etc.,.

In a sense, a case can be made that this dualism is innate as we now have arrived at this technological dualistic posture that saturates our way of communicating. It then is just another epoch of our dualistic binary path. And while the “bible” is out of scope for my work, so much to say here. I find this work fascinating which is why I explore biases in Computational Rhetoric. I feel I need to follow up with another piece on this fascinating topic."

To your question - do we need them, I retort: Are we even evolved enough to not need them?" I think human evolution is still in its infant states. We cannot help our simplistic classification systems. It is innate to our conditions here. Which then forces the question of why have we not bypassed this simplicity?

Happy Holidays!