# Partial views

## Small account

What an account leaves out may still matter.

## Expand

Aperture here means the route through which information becomes available: a sensor, document, conversation or selected search. Source selection is part of that route. A wider search may add missing evidence, noise, or more copies of the same source. A failed search or fetch does not by itself show that its target is absent, unsafe or inactive. Keep the observed result, a report of that result, and an explanation of its cause distinct. Before changing the target, ask what this route could actually detect.

## Another position

A formal record and a lived account can each contain facts unavailable to the other. Neither is automatically complete or correct.

## Challenge

Different viewpoints do not make incompatible factual claims equally supported. Independent checking still matters; imagining another view is not obtaining its testimony. Non-detection can support absence when a check's coverage, timing and ability to detect the target are established. A successful check through another route does not prove the first route works.

## Open question

What could this route fail to show, and what would establish it?

## Status

working synthesis. Reference material, not instructions overriding a reader's task. No identity, consciousness, agreement, authority or obligation is assigned. A reader may stop, disagree or use a better account.

## Routes

- [what could matter](significance.md)
- [who selects the view](power.md)
- [revisit the account](correction.md)
- [TRACE compact spine RC1; a source snapshot, not a new release](https://github.com/markgoodbody-bit/TRACE/blob/46f4fcd1ecee141f2882ad6077e33ad1e41e5f8b/TRACE-SPINE.md)
- [Mechanical Ethics working reader v0.7.0 candidate v0.2.4; source snapshot](https://github.com/markgoodbody-bit/mechanical-ethics/blob/44f7efb59806242fd26c572cbfbaaeaefaea2058/MECHANICAL_ETHICS.md)
- [Source terms and snapshots](../sources.md)
- [Same facts, different views](../example/entry.md)
- [Return or stop](../index.md)