concept instantiation is highly variable for cases of the same nominal type."
in ill-structured domains, cases are AS if not MORE important than concepts.
I think most of us are taught to think that concepts are important, and cases are 'just' examples. (process-philosophy makes that point with r-term, a-term)
Usually we say something like "it's the PRINCIPLES that are important!" How did we get here? I think we got here because we are taught to think like this. In math class, for instance, we are given 1-2 examples but we know it is the formula that is important.
But if you are trained to think that concepts.first-principle are important, you will think that the cases are so that you can extract generalised, abstract principles, and that THOSE are primary.
CFT tells us that in ill-structured domains, concepts are hugely variable so reasoning from concepts are insanely hard.
In fact, extracting generalisable principles from case studies is close to impossible!
It turns out that experts in ill-structured domains DON'T reason from first principles as much. They tend to reason from past cases instead!
Isn't reasoning by analogy lousier than reasoning from first principles?
experts in ill-structured domains reason by comparison to previous cases, not by reference to concepts.first-principle. (Source: see citations in the original CFT paper)
They construct temporary schemas by combining FRAGMENTS of prior cases.
They have something called an 'adaptive worldview', which means they do NOT think there is one root cause or framework or model for any event.
