Classic Laws of Thought
The principle of excluded middle, along with its complement, the law of contradiction (the second of the three classic laws of thought), are correlates of the law of identity (the first of these laws). Because the principle of identity intellectually partitions the Universe into exactly two parts: "self" and "other", it creates a dichotomy wherein the two parts are "mutually exclusive" and "jointly exhaustive". The principle of contradiction is merely an expression of the mutually exclusive aspect of that dichotomy, and the principle of excluded middle is an expression of its jointly exhaustive aspect.
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