“Feedback must come from the specific to the general.”

From Destruction and Creation;

There are two ways in which we can develop and manipulate mental concepts to represent observed reality: we can start from a comprehensive whole and break it down to its particulars or we can start with the particulars and build towards a comprehensive whole. Saying it another way, but in a related sense, we can go from the general-to-specific or from the specific-to-general. A little reflection here reveals that deduction is related to proceeding from the general-to-specific while induction is related to proceeding from the specific-to-general. In following this line of thought, can we think of other activities that are related to these two opposing ideas? Is not analysis related to proceeding from the general-to-specific? Is not synthesis, the opposite of analysis, related to proceeding from the specific-to-general? Putting all this together: Can we not say that general-to-specific is related to both deduction and analysis, while specific-to-general is related to induction and synthesis? Now, can we think of some examples to fit with these two opposing ideas?

In the simple systems diagram the obvious answer is the direction of the signals flow. So what does that mean?

If your aim is to reach a goal deduction, general-to-specific seems to be the process you’ll employ. A goal is a desired specific end state. To get there from here you’ll need to ignore anything that’s extraneous to the journey. You don’t need redundancies, alternatives, options, just the bare bones. Analysis, focus, concentration, coordination, attention and insight are the tools of goal directed action. These are all reductionist terms.

But how do you know what you want when all of the end states are changing? In a match deductive analysis must have a pretty short shelf life. You’ll be chasing a non-existent end state before you know it or, as pilots call it ‘flying behind the airplane.’

The other side of the coin must lie in feedback. As Melanie Mitchell writes, “feedback must come from the specific to the general” and that is supported by experience. Feedback is the way that you reassemble a moment, examine it, it’s consequences and causes in order to learn from it. Feedback is based on reflection of experience. It broadens your understanding of what happened. The tools of feedback are making connections. It’s analogous, metaphorical, synthetic thinking that can expand your options as well as appreciation.

Marianne Paget shows why there’s a need to find a balance between feed forward and feedback;

“The unfolding act is sometimes ambiguous because its trajectory is unknown. It intends and aims at an appropriate response and presses into the unknown in order to achieve it… An inquiry uses the prism of the wrong result to peer back in time. Inquirers reason with knowledge of that result. But reasoning with knowledge of what is now knowable is very different from reasoning with knowledge of what was then known… Yet an asymmetry in understanding remains, for a retrospective inquiry cannot capture the subjects own experience of acting in the stream of time. This asymmetry is inherent in the retrieval of all subjective experience.”