C.43:4.1.1 - Recover control relations before judging their quality

Relate the change being considered to the means of influencing it. Recover both why an input or rule is set in relation to the relevant outcome and how its execution can affect that outcome. The rule can be embodied in a mechanical arrangement, physiological mechanism, program or agreement. It need not represent alternatives explicitly or employ a conscious chooser. In an explanatory inquiry, the proposed regulated characteristic and its relation to the mechanism are claims to investigate. Compare what would happen under a changed reference, observation, available intervention or disturbance. This gives the account explanatory content beyond describing a trajectory after it happened.

Keep three questions available. Description recovers the relations that obtain, their participants and the consequential gaps. Explanation derives what those relations do under the stated conditions, including an unwanted result. Design compares changes that could make the continuation more suitable. A descriptive or explanatory inquiry can finish without prescribing a new arrangement. In design, an intelligible description of the incumbent supplies a comparison basis, not a reason to retain it.

Control can be open over a selected interval. An input is selected or set from the initial situation and then executed without using later observations to correct it within that interval. Establish the conditions under which that choice remains adequate. A later decision can close a wider loop by using the resulting observation. Feedback exists where a subsequent influence depends on returned observations; that dependence can remain operative while the observed value and the resulting input stay unchanged. Whether the response is timely and beneficial requires its own explanation. Use C.30.LCA to recover these obtaining relations and C.32.LCA when changing their organization is the needed result.

The subject of the decision, the information and interventions available to each participant, and the physical realization can have different boundaries. One device can estimate, choose, act and modify its own means. Several participants can jointly supply one influence, and each can be influenced by the others. Recover the contributions and their actual connection before allocating them to parts. A combined mathematical description can retain joint dynamics when a clean separation of states is unsuitable. Its coordinates do not themselves establish physical parthood.

For distributed control, preserve what each participant can know and do. Writing local rules as u_i(t) = pi_i(I_i(t)) makes their information dependence explicit; collecting those rules into one notation creates no shared observation, communication channel or authority. Compare their joint effects with shared resources, timing and constraints. The constructive work is obtaining the required cooperation, not merely drawing a larger controller around the participants.