Counting means first and foremost looking at the world: you cannot count with your eyes closed. Yet one person's view of the reality being counted will differ from another's. Counting is therefore fundamentally personal, as can be seen, for example, in:
\- how we select—and therefore reject—what we count (and what we do not count);
\- how we group the entities being counted—and therefore separate them: men and women, smokers and non-smokers, adults and minors...;
\- the technique used to record the information—and therefore to summarize certain characteristics of the entities counted: we count people living in cities, but not nomads.
Necessary choices
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