I'd be interested in your perspective, do you have any other comments about this question generally? Do you think it's good to question your intuitions/perceptions or do you try to do it less than you already do?
I'm not sure how much else I can add to this discussion, and I haven't had the time to do more than skim the majority of the posts in this thread (sorry if I repeat anything that anyone else said!), but here's some thoughts that are floating around in my head.
This discussion reminds me of the play "Doubt," which I had to read for one of my classes last year (it was also turned into a movie recently). The whole play is about how all we have to go on when judging others is what they put out externally, and there's always a possibility that we're wrong about what's going on internally. The play is about whether or not a priest has molested a boy, and it never actually tells you what the real answer is. I saw an interview from the author, and he was talking about how important it was to him that he doesn't reveal what really happened because the message is that we
can't actually know all of the whole truth in real life and that it's actually wiser to be uncertain than have strong convictions.
I do agree with the idea that there's no way that anyone can know the whole truth about
anything, and so questioning your judgments/feelings/ideas is a part of a good attempt at getting closer to what the truth actually is. This goes for anyone, whatever their dominant cognitive function is.
And I realize that Ni is inherently a perceiving function that never actually stops adjusting and adding to itself, and I realize that the majority of (healthy) Ni-doms have a habit of questioning their Ni ideas because of what I was saying in the previous paragraph. But for what it's worth, I still feel like I probably question what my Ni is saying at every step of the process of trying to find the truth more than the average Ni-dom. It can get ridiculous sometimes. Going off of what Z Buck said (sorry, I don't know how to do the mention thing) in her previous post where she says she sometimes ignores her Ni hunches because of being too difficult to explain, for me I do sometimes ignore them for the same reason, but a lot of times it's just that I plain
don't trust them. It's like as soon as I have an awareness that I'm getting a notion of something, I have to play devil's advocate with myself. I start looking for holes in it right away. This doesn't happen every single time I have a hunch, but it happens a whole lot.
And the thing is, when I look back on situations that happen, I do feel like those initial hunches I had were usually right in the first place (which some people have talked about already). But when it's happening in real time, the devil's advocate part of myself still comes out because I'm very aware that I could possibly be wrong. I do think this has to do with e6 (as well as probably having something to do with some inherent nature of being an Ni-dom) because of the issues of relating to trust and feeling like things are inherently insecure.
This happens in all situations for me, but definitely also for trying to figure out people. It happens more often than I wish it did that I get an initial feeling that me and someone else could be friends, but then I distrust it and don't try to initiate anything only to find out later that me and them do become friends, and the opposite in that I get an initial feeling that I should stay away from them but then don't listen to it and end up wasting my time on someone. Just in the past couple weeks, I started to become friends with someone (she's probably an ENFP) who I initially got a feeling that we could become friends at the beginning of the semester
within the first three seconds of seeing her across a classroom and without ever speaking to her, but then I told myself that how could I possibly know that. And since me and her never talked to each other for most of the semester (it's toward the end now), I figured that I was wrong. But just recently, she came up to me and was like, "I know that me and you never got a chance to talk to each other, but I feel like if we did that we would be friends. Do you want to hang out?". And now we do! This distrust of my first reaction followed by me finding out I should have listened to it is something that happens over and over. And I also relate to it being worse for someone I'm interested in romantically. I seriously think that I need to have someone sneak up on me (figuratively speaking!) in order to date me. If I know definitely that I have a crush on them, then our relationship is doomed.
What I'm really trying to say is that while I believe what I said before about uncertainty being part of any real path to trying to discover the truth about something, I also really believe that it can go to the point of being harmful instead of helpful. Where is the line at which uncertainty crosses into the dark side? I don't know, that's what I'm really trying to figure out. At some point, it comes down to that yes it's impossible for anyone to have full knowledge of anything and yes our opinion/Ni hunches could change with incoming information. But our own conclusions and thoughts are all that we have to work with. It's imperfect, but it's all we got. And at some point, it's helpful to just tell the noise to shut up and just go with it. That's what I'm working on
Okay, I guess I had more to say about this than I thought I did, lol. Hopefully when I get more time, I can really dig into the other posts in this thread more closely because it looks interesting. Damn semester final projects.
Edit: Since I'm talking about my own uncertainties, I have to add that I also have
OCD, which at its heart is all about uncertainty, so that could affect some of the things that I'm saying in this post.