Opposite concepts need separate definitions rather than logical negation.

Evidence

This guideline is central because of the fundamentally asymmetric nature of most bipolar concepts. This volume argues throughout that these traditional opposites such as war–peace involve conceptual asymmetry: one is not the mirror image or inverse of the other. Our conceptualization and measurement of war (i.e., highly militarized and hostile relationships) involve different defining features from the concept of interstate peace (Goertz et al. 2016). — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 637

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the corpus’s recurring finding that absence-of-X and presence-of-opposite-X have distinct causes (e.g. noise vs. silence as a positive presence rather than mere absence).
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘Peace is not the absence of war’ as a measurement problem — how every policy indicator that treats the good state as zero-of-the-bad-state conceals an entire separate definitional project.