This sounds sort of akin to rationalism vs. empiricism. Rationalism seems sort of Ti, and empiricism seems sort of Te.
and yet we
just saw 3 NTPs gathering and building on empirical sources to figure things out throughout a discussion
were we all typed incorrectly? i doubt it.
did we not use our Ti? yes, yes we did.
real people outside of personality pages will go for internal logic or empirical evidence depending on the situation.
all other metaphors seem to have the same failing:
people switch between "bottom up" (Ti) and "top down" (Te) approaches.
people switch between deductive (Ti) and inductive (Te) reasoning all the time.
did i mention the "fact checking" trait? i think both sides have made the claims to that...
the metaphors break down the moment you apply them to any real person... and yet, it would clearly be incorrect to say that the personality differences between TPs and TJs aren't there: we see them in people all around us. even if people do all of the above, there are clearly different intellectual habits built over time, different preferences, even different levels of enjoyment from different kinds of intellectual activities, and similarities on all those levels do indeed seem to center around two dots in the possible-mindspace, each packed with personality traits that have nothing to do with discussions and arguing styles at all.
so what is it?
here's my bet so far:
it's not that Te people are exploring information differently, it's that they aren't really
exploring information in the first place, they are
using the information.
they carry an internal backpack of what constitutes themselves: what they want, what they deem right, how they would like things to be - essentially their Fi - and not being able to see it out there in the real world is a source of cognitive dissonance for them - the stressful wedge between their internal world and the outside world - so they walk through life looking for ways to unpack that backpack. they use their logic as a pathfinding system, making a map of how to go from A to Z. they are more prone to empirical evidence not because they can't see inconsistencies or fallacies, but because empirical evidence is a lot more useful when one is making a mental map in which you plan to walk on.
Ti people? we don't have that backpack to unload, instead we absorb information, and the resulting stressful wedge between our internal world and the outside world - the cognitive dissonance we seek to resolve - stems directly from our own lack of understanding the information we absorb. this is why we explore it, ask dozen questions and when each is answered ask a dozen more, we play around with the information, poke it, feel out it's shape & experiment with it, forming a better definition of it, stretch it to opposite ends and then push them to collide with each other to find out the inconsistencies. we're the ones pushing the red button for no reason other than finding out what it does. it's not that the logic is mechanically different, it's a logical thinking that is trained to satisfy a different sort of need, a different form of cognitive dissonance.