How many INFJs assumed they were Ts before they understood typology?

[John K]

I used to test as INFP and INTP a lot and had a great "debunking" theory about Ti and Fi being functionally the same and interchangeable.

LOL

I come across a lot of ad hoc debates that are claimed to be rational - logical, but just below the surface I realise I'm being told what I 'ought' to think.

 

[Sidis Coruscatis]

LOL

I come across a lot of ad hoc debates that are claimed to be rational - logical, but just below the surface I realise I'm being told what I 'ought' to think.

I don't know if it was your intent, but this would explain my Te perfectly lol.
It's bizarre but I don't think I've seen the word "logic" thrown around anywhere as much as in MBTI.

 

[John K]

I don't know if it was your intent, but this would explain my Te perfectly lol.
It's bizarre but I don't think I've seen the word "logic" thrown around anywhere as much as in MBTI.

I quite agree - most debate doesn’t use pure logic in the sense of agreeing axiomatic givens then building on them using the rules of logic. It seems to me that a lot of the time people are actually expressing their convictions instead. There is often an Fi charged flavour to these.

 

[Sidis Coruscatis]

I quite agree - most debate doesn’t use pure logic in the sense of agreeing axiomatic givens then building on them using the rules of logic. It seems to me that a lot of the time people are actually expressing their convictions instead. There is often an Fi charged flavour to these.

That makes sense, and I'm not sure that debating something strictly dialectically is even possible as it would require keeping track of insane amount of data only to arrive at the realization that an axiomatic divide is often a matter of qualia. For the same reason, even the most honest dialectician has some casuistry in him.

This is incidentally what angers me when dealing with hardcore MBTI fanboys. It's like the answer to any criticism is "you don't understand the functions", as if their definitions weren't inherently vague. Over the years I tested as ISFP, INFP, ISTJ, INTP, INTJ and possibly INFJ, and here's the thing - I was able to perfectly justify it every time. The core issue is epistemic in nature; it's not enough to know the functions, you also have to know how to interpret your own cognitive processes to map those functions onto you correctly. Given that we don't exist in vacuum, I'm sure you can see why that's a bit problematic to say the least. Most explanations then amount to little more than ad hoc mental gymnastics.

Just to finish my thought about the Fi/Ti duality - Ti is often referred to as logic (or even "subjective" logic in contrast to Te "objective" logic - where the hell do people get this stuff? Red logic is blue logic is green logic.) and Fi as adherence to morality or self-understanding. But this distinction is arbitrary, because any sort of understanding or morality must have a logical latticework to explain why is it/should be so, regardless of whether that morality is meticulously constructed by you or enculturated (as Fe is often portrayed). This would indicate that in the case of IxFPs, they would have basically no idea why they act the way they do with Ti being last. Socionics manage to reconcile this by assigning different proficiencies across the stack, but then the ordering of the stack becomes unintuitive. The only noticeable difference seems to be in the fact that Ti is concerned with impersonal concepts and Fi with personal ones, but both demand logical consistency.

This may be partly due to my own ignorance, but at this point there are so many spins on the interconnectivity of the functions that it seems like an afterthought. Whoever keeps spreading these definitions should be soundly flogged.

 

[John K]

That makes sense, and I'm not sure that debating something strictly dialectically is even possible as it would require keeping track of insane amount of data only to arrive at the realization that an axiomatic divide is often a matter of qualia. For the same reason, even the most honest dialectician has some casuistry in him.

This is incidentally what angers me when dealing with hardcore MBTI fanboys. It's like the answer to any criticism is "you don't understand the functions", as if their definitions weren't inherently vague. Over the years I tested as ISFP, INFP, ISTJ, INTP, INTJ and possibly INFJ, and here's the thing - I was able to perfectly justify it every time. The core issue is epistemic in nature; it's not enough to know the functions, you also have to know how to interpret your own cognitive processes to map those functions onto you correctly. Given that we don't exist in vacuum, I'm sure you can see why that's a bit problematic to say the least. Most explanations then amount to little more than ad hoc mental gymnastics.

Just to finish my thought about the Fi/Ti duality - Ti is often referred to as logic (or even "subjective" logic in contrast to Te "objective" logic - where the hell do people get this stuff? Red logic is blue logic is green logic.) and Fi as adherence to morality or self-understanding. But this distinction is arbitrary, because any sort of understanding or morality must have a logical latticework to explain why is it/should be so, regardless of whether that morality is meticulously constructed by you or enculturated (as Fe is often portrayed). This would indicate that in the case of IxFPs, they would have basically no idea why they act the way they do with Ti being last. Socionics manage to reconcile this by assigning different proficiencies across the stack, but then the ordering of the stack becomes unintuitive. The only noticeable difference seems to be in the fact that Ti is concerned with impersonal concepts and Fi with personal ones, but both demand logical consistency.

This may be partly due to my own ignorance, but at this point there are so many spins on the interconnectivity of the functions that it seems like an afterthought. Whoever keeps spreading these definitions should be soundly flogged.

LOL I like the idea of non-verbal explanations / responses.

Of course I have my own opinions about Jungian typology. Jung himself warned about the fallacy of using it as a parlour game and I think one of his practical aims was to provide a simple, consistent, empirical way for an analyst to gain some initial orientation when dealing with new patients in therapy.

I don't like the excessive complexification that comes from some of the dialects of his typology - Jung didn't really see the non-preferred functions as being highly differentiated in people who hadn't travelled some way down the path of individuation.

It seems to me that everyone uses all the functions, and they can be hard to separate out from our specific individual behaviours. An obvious example is where a function is mandatory regardless of preference - in driving around a supermarket car park and parking the car, I'll use lots of Te regardless of where it sits in my MBTI type, otherwise I'll have a nasty crash. This is where a lot of confusion comes from - I think Jung was identifying the functions we automatically go-to and are most comfortable and proficient at using. We use all the others in complex combinations otherwise we wouldn't survive long in everyday life - the issue is which ones are we most habituated to, where do we have the greatest virtuosity, and which can we direct more easily at will. Maybe more subtly, which ones are more closely connected to our unconscious attitudes and behaviours.

 

[Sidis Coruscatis]

LOL I like the idea of non-verbal explanations / responses.

Of course I have my own opinions about Jungian typology. Jung himself warned about the fallacy of using it as a parlour game and I think one of his practical aims was to provide a simple, consistent, empirical way for an analyst to gain some initial orientation when dealing with new patients in therapy.

I don't like the excessive complexification that comes from some of the dialects of his typology - Jung didn't really see the non-preferred functions as being highly differentiated in people who hadn't travelled some way down the path of individuation.

It seems to me that everyone uses all the functions, and they can be hard to separate out from our specific individual behaviours. An obvious example is where a function is mandatory regardless of preference - in driving around a supermarket car park and parking the car, I'll use lots of Te regardless of where it sits in my MBTI type, otherwise I'll have a nasty crash. This is where a lot of confusion comes from - I think Jung was identifying the functions we automatically go-to and are most comfortable and proficient at using. We use all the others in complex combinations otherwise we wouldn't survive long in everyday life - the issue is which ones are we most habituated to, where do we have the greatest virtuosity, and which can we direct more easily at will. Maybe more subtly, which ones are more closely connected to our unconscious attitudes and behaviours.

I think you misunderstood me John, I meant dialectic as in philosophical method where opinions are exchanged in order to reconcile them into one central truth, not dialogue in itself. Unless I'm misunderstanding you now. That's a spicy interpretation though.

Sounds sensible enough to me. There are efforts to expand the typology to 64 or even hundreds of subtypes to provide some leeway in the manifestation of these functions and hopefully will alleviate the confusion and gatekeeping and stereotyping which I'm grateful for, but that's a can of worms I don't want to deal with anytime soon.

 

[John K]

I think you misunderstood me John, I meant dialectic as in philosophical method where opinions are exchanged in order to reconcile them into one central truth, not dialogue in itself. Unless I'm misunderstanding you now. That's a spicy interpretation though.

Sounds sensible enough to me. There are efforts to expand the typology to 64 or even hundreds of subtypes to provide some leeway in the manifestation of these functions and hopefully will alleviate the confusion and gatekeeping and stereotyping which I'm grateful for, but that's a can of worms I don't want to deal with anytime soon.

Sorry! - I was just overtaken with the idea of using flogging in an explanatory way . It wasn't a comment on your thoughts about formal logic in debate.

I definitely agree with the difficulty of using formalised dialectic in everyday debate. I'm pretty rusty now but my academic background is in mathematics, and I spent most of my working life in computer systems. I think these are the only two walks of life I've come across where precision logic is used extensively and exclusively in all its glory. In each case, the process is incomprehensible to non-experts: it can be translated into everyday language, but even simple examples of maths or computer programming become unwieldy, imprecise, boring and impossible to follow when not expressed in the languages that have been specialised for them. I know that there are formal structures to the use of logic more generally, but I'd love to see a political debate carried out using these as a way to convince voters lol. Probably the nearest you get to logic used extensively in colloquial language is in courts of law, or in the fine details of law enactment in legislative assemblies, or in instruction manuals,etc, where every attempt is made to be precise - but even these come with specialised terminology that makes them relatively inaccessible to non-experts.

 

[Sidis Coruscatis]

Sorry! - I was just overtaken with the idea of using flogging in an explanatory way . It wasn't a comment on your thoughts about formal logic in debate.

I definitely agree with the difficulty of using formalised dialectic in everyday debate. I'm pretty rusty now but my academic background is in mathematics, and I spent most of my working life in computer systems. I think these are the only two walks of life I've come across where precision logic is used extensively and exclusively in all its glory. In each case, the process is incomprehensible to non-experts: it can be translated into everyday language, but even simple examples of maths or computer programming become unwieldy, imprecise, boring and impossible to follow when not expressed in the languages that have been specialised for them. I know that there are formal structures to the use of logic more generally, but I'd love to see a political debate carried out using these as a way to convince voters lol. Probably the nearest you get to logic used extensively in colloquial language is in courts of law, or in the fine details of law enactment in legislative assemblies, or in instruction manuals,etc, where every attempt is made to be precise - but even these come with specialised terminology that makes them relatively inaccessible to non-experts.

It does explain a lot, especially when asked about your bedroom kinks.

I don't know what else to add, except: Thank God for fuzzy logic. Sometimes "close enough" is close enough.