Section 12 The extras rule: adding extra information, in particular about the levels or values of the variables

Given a map and some extra information about the values of the variables and/or the nature of the influence, we can add that information, in ordinary English, to the arrows and variables

From this:

and, the English sentence asserted in the same context

“Variable B = 22 “

We can derive this (and vice versa):

In fact, we already did this when we added a plain-English description of the function to the label of the consequence variable in the mini-map coding rule

The three dots ... indicate that what comes after is not formally part of our Soft Arithmetic.

The same goes for any other kind of information in English (or any other natural language, of course) which tells us something about the state, or value, or level of one or more variables like or “Variable B is high” or “the level of Variable B is 22” or “Variable B is on” or even “Person B’s emotion is angry rather than sad”.

12.1 Interpretation

It just says, you can move information about the levels of the variables formulated in English sentences into similar statements on the variables themselves within the map, and back again. The extra information is not part of soft arithmetic in the narrower sense. We don’t (yet) have soft arithmetic rules for manipulating it, but we can use ordinary common sense.

12.2 Corollary: Ordinary reasoning

From the rules above it follows that you do not need an extra rule to do ordinary reasoning with causal maps. So from the above map you can also deduce the map below. (To check, remember that we could use the Extras Rule to covert the map into the map without the extra information plus the English sentence “B = 22” and from this we can use ordinary reasoning to get the English sentence “B < 30” which we can then combine with the map without the extra information to give the version below.)