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Originally Posted by athenian200
How exactly am I supposed to know what my motivations for any given action are, because I could look at my entire past and interpret my reasons for doing everything I did from several different perspectives. I could do the same with everyone else's past.
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Again, the way you phrase the question and the questions you ask actually are suggestive of a particular function (Ni). Every thing you say and do are clues as to what your general motivations are. There are other people who would NEVER ask this sort of question, nor even THINK of this question, and might not even UNDERSTAND your question.
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Finally, how can I actually know that the functions described actually exist, and are not simply ideas proposed to describe the reasons for differences between people's behavior, but do not completely explain everything? If they don't explain anything, how can they even give us a picture of what we might be like?
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No theory explains everything. There's variability in every theory, especially of personality -- because all people are completely unique, both in biology and in environment. Take even the same person and raise them 100 years in the future or past, and while their general personality might be the same, they will STILL differentiate because of the environmental differences.
The functions are just generalized tendencies -- one way of looking at behavior and motivation. various paradigms exist because there are different ways to model the world, and we evaluate them based on their
predictive nature.
I think if someone can use a model to predict behavior more than chance would predict, then the model has some use. No model encompasses ALL truth from all angles at once; there is no unified theory of EVERYTHING, there are simply different ways to look at the world, some more predictive than others.
Does this make sense?
The more specific the model gets, the more likely it is to produce wrong answers. The functions of MBTI are general enough to be useful and categorize (1) the way we perceive the world and (2) the way we evaluate data and make decisions. There are other ways to do this, but this model is effective enough to be predictive with people who know how to use it.