Every person operates from an axiom stack—a layered architecture of bedrock presuppositions, inquiry algorithms, and worldview outputs. This chapter makes that invisible structure visible, lays out three major examples (Scientific-Existentialist, Scriptural-Theist, and Dharmic/Taoist), and introduces the concepts of entailment costs, incommensurability, and sovereign choice. The foundation for understanding why intelligent people looking at the same world can reach radically

A tour of four ways the world has answered the question "How do I know?"—the Western analytic tradition, Buddhist epistemology, Chinese Confucian and Daoist thought, and Ubuntu/Indigenous relational knowing. Not a competition, but a landscape. Each tradition reveals something the others miss. This chapter prepares you to understand this book's stance as one approach among many.