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Whose air quality number is right?

From India·A current case, last reviewed September 2026

On a smoggy Delhi morning, official monitors, embassy sensors and cheap home devices can disagree by wide margins, and the choice of averaging window changes whether a day counts as severe. Residents deciding whether a child plays outside are arbitrating between instruments.

The concepts this raises

Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.

EvidenceGrounds of Knowledge
What is offered in support of a claim. Evidence is not the same as proof: it raises or lowers how likely a claim is, and its force depends on how it was gathered, what it was gathered for, and what else it is consistent with. Asking what would count as evidence against a claim is usually more revealing than listing evidence for it.
ObjectivityStatus of Knowledge
Independence from the particular standpoint of any individual knower. Objectivity is better understood as something a method or a community achieves through checks on individual bias than as something a single knower can simply decide to have.

Where it sits in the knowledge framework

Methods and tools
The practices, conventions, instruments and forms of reasoning through which knowledge here is actually made, together with the assumptions those methods build in and what they are structurally unable to detect.

Areas of knowledge

The same ideas, somewhere else

Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.