No View Is the Whole

No View Is the Whole

No View Is the Whole

The World and the Ways We Make Sense of It

Soman Lin

The book opens on a handful of scenes far apart from one another: a horse in Berlin that seemed to do arithmetic; a physician in London in 1854 asking door to door which pump the dead had drunk from; an autopilot over the Atlantic handing control back to two co-pilots; a computer alarm on the lunar lander that nobody had yet traced; a priest under the ruined Rashomon gate handing a child to a woodcutter whose story had already changed once.

They point at one question: how the way we make sense of the world is itself formed, who can check it, and how it is handed on to the next person. The author calls the turn of counting oneself in “the second realisation”, and closes with a claim about long-term reliance: when choosing a method, weigh how it will shape the evidence, learning and correction available later.

Fifteen chapters in four parts, seventeen figures, seventy-five sources you can check. Chinese and English, switchable inside the reader.

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Contents

Preface — Counting Yourself In

Part One — What Belief Rests On

  1. How a Fact Becomes a Sentence
  2. You Do Not Have to Know Everything Yourself
  3. Who Decides What Is Worth Looking At

Part Two — Models, Their Uses, and Where They Apply

  1. A Different Representation Makes Thinking Possible
  2. What Was Left Out Is Still at Work
  3. Useful, True, and Worthwhile
  4. Answers Come with Conditions
  5. Giving Error a Chance to Show

Part Three — The Finite Mind

  1. What It Takes to Understand a Person
  2. Borrowing Other People's Thinking
  3. Thinking Has Deadlines Too
  4. What We Know Before We Can Say It
  5. One Body, Many Kinds of Regulation

Part Four — Understanding the World Together

  1. Letting Other People's Findings Change Decisions
  2. What Makes an Understanding Worth Relying On

An afterword and the “Coordinates and Sources” close the book: seventy-five notes, so every story, study and figure quoted in the text can be checked at its source.