Lindblom’s decisive proposition is that complex public decisions are not degraded versions of comprehensive rationality but operate through a different epistemic logic: successive limited comparisons. Values and instruments are selected together, only a restricted field of alternatives is examined, experience substitutes for exhaustive theory, and policy remains corrigible through repetition. The methodological operation is therefore subtraction. Instead of asking whether decision-makers possess a complete representation of the problem, Lindblom reconstructs what can actually be compared under limits of information, time and cognition. Planning becomes a sequence of provisional discriminations rather than the execution of a pre-existing optimum. This makes visible a crucial condition for any study of the period before a formal plan: the alternatives that enter decision are already historically filtered, institutionally familiar and unevenly imaginable. The text bridges public administration, decision theory and planning by treating incompleteness not merely as a defect but as an operative structure. For a continuity-based account of planning, its importance lies in showing that evidence survives by remaining actionable within a moving sequence, not by becoming exhaustive.
