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What exactly is the difference between Ti and Ni, Si and Fi, and others?

Triglav

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Sep 26, 2009
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MBTI Type
INTP
People with a strong Ti often are misperceived as having a strong Ni and vice versa. How exactly are these two functions different from each other? Same with Si and Fi.
 

VagrantFarce

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Nov 19, 2008
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Ni is an introverted perceiving function, and is associated with imaginative premonitions of near-absolute certainty for no discernable reason. "I have a feeling that X will happen, I just know." Dominant Ni types are often stereotyped as insane conspiracy theorists or psychics. Ti is an introverted judging function, and acts as a sort of subjective, impersonal categorisation of all things. It's often associated with "finding the right word" for something, e.g. what obscure genre of music a song might fit under.

A dominant Ni type would probably reject the very idea of Ti as too limiting and arbitrary, whereas a dominant Ti type would find Ni utterly incomprehensible!

Si is similar to Ni, but the source is different. Instead of recognising patterns over time to predict the future, it draws from past experiences to inform decision-making. This creates a security-minded worldview, where every small detail must be thoroughly checked before it can be trusted. Fi is similar to Ti, but instead of impersonal cateogirsation the focus is on feelings. A dominant-Fi user's first port of call is understand how a person feels, irregardless of their social status or character e.g. the nun in the film "Dead Man Walking" who empathises with the Sean Penn character, despite him being on Death Row for rape and murder.

So basically, Fi and Ti are about understanding how things are without really making an outward judgement. Ni and Si are perceiving functions that are used for decision-making, and are associated with strong certainty.
 

redacted

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Nov 28, 2007
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Ni and Si are unconscious, Ti and Fi are conscious. Everything that bubbles up to consciousness is an example of a perceiving function. Every conscious judgment is an example of a judging function.

If you split perceiving into S and N, S is the part that does, well, sensing, and N is the part that attaches metaphorical meaning. All the stuff that comes to consciousness is some amalgamation of S and N stuff. Anyway, introverted perceiving is biased towards the internal standard, as in, current thought processes/unconscious tendencies. So when choosing what information to gather (S) or what information to associate meaning with (N), Pi functions pick out stuff that's specifically relevant to the internal standard (all unconsciously, still). The extroverted ones don't care about the current thought process or anything, they just want as much environmental information as possible, so they look for new things without bias.

(I is environment doesn't matter, E is self doesn't matter.)

Thinking and Feeling are subsets of judgment -- Thinking does true/false stuff, Feeling does good/bad stuff (or important/not important stuff). Ji functions use the premises of the internal standard to make their judgments (current thought processes/unconscious tendencies), whereas Je functions don't care about the self and go with premises that are efficient in the world.

Xi functions favor depth, Xe functions favor breadth.

Anyway, the reason people think Xi functions look like each other is that they're all biased towards the self and ignore environmental factors. This means they're slow to react to environmental change.

And since everyone has introverted and extroverted functions all over the place, it's hard (sometimes extremely hard) to tell which ones are introverted and which are extroverted. So sometimes an INTP can look like an INTJ because they both do a lot of processing without environmental input. etc. etc.
 

Polaris

AKA Nunki
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Apr 7, 2009
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MBTI Type
INFJ
Enneagram
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Instinctual Variant
sp/sx
Ni is an introverted perceiving function, and is associated with imaginative premonitions of near-absolute certainty for no discernable reason. "I have a feeling that X will happen, I just know." Dominant Ni types are often stereotyped as insane conspiracy theorists or psychics. Ti is an introverted judging function, and acts as a sort of subjective, impersonal categorisation of all things. It's often associated with "finding the right word" for something, e.g. what obscure genre of music a song might fit under.
To me, Ni is more about shifting your perspective. A basic example of this (lazily drawn from what someone said in the Ender's Game topic) would be to walk "down" the street, and then to think that from other viewpoints you're walking up, left, right, and so forth. You've framed your perspective inside another one that transforms how things appear to you. It's when you pair this with Je that you're most likely to think in terms of the future. Je orients itself toward goals, and so when Je engages Ni, or vice versa, Ni will think in terms of how the future frames the present, which then allows you to act accordingly.

Ti doesn't have much to do with that. What Ti does is attune itself to physical and abstract structure. A Ti-user will call on a mental sorting system, such as logic or a sense of aesthetic harmony, and use that as a tool to structure their thoughts and notice structure in the environment. What doesn't fit with that sense of order--logical errors, for example--Ti will critique and attempt to re-categorize.

There are only two places where the processes really cross. The first is that they can both lead a person to develop a system for viewing the world. In the case of Ni, this system will base itself on perspective and transcend the mundane (think of Gnosticism, which advocates liberation from the world). Ti, on the other hand, will create a system based on logic and order (think of physics). That's the first point of similarity. The second point of similarity is that these processes both lead a person to develop inner imagery. The difference is in the type of imagery. Ti will visualize the structure and flow of a system in a rational and orderly manner. For Ni, the images will cover a wider range of territory, from the mundane to the dreamlike, and they won't make a lot of logical sense. In many cases, they'll answer a question you didn't even ask, and in others they'll simply transform how you view something.

Actually, there's one more point they have in common, now that I think of it. Both types of thinking can lead to skepticism. An Ni-user will wonder if they aren't being mislead by appearances (which apparently makes them prone to conspiracy theories), and a Ti user will question whether something is true according to good logic (they usually don't consider how subjective logic, as an introverted process, actually is). Those are two very different brands of skepticism, but they can look a lot alike, even to the person using them.
 

VagrantFarce

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To me, Ni is more about shifting your perspective. A basic example of this (lazily drawn from what someone said in the Ender's Game topic) would be to walk "down" the street, and then to think that from other viewpoints you're walking up, left, right, and so forth. You've framed your perspective inside another one that transforms how things appear to you. It's when you pair this with Je that you're most likely to think in terms of the future. Je orients itself toward goals, and so when Je engages Ni, or vice versa, Ni will think in terms of how the future frames the present, which then allows you to act accordingly.

Excuse me while I carve this description into my forehead with a compass. :)
 

raz

Let's make this showy!
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Nov 11, 2008
Messages
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MBTI Type
LoLz
To me, Ni is more about shifting your perspective. A basic example of this (lazily drawn from what someone said in the Ender's Game topic) would be to walk "down" the street, and then to think that from other viewpoints you're walking up, left, right, and so forth. You've framed your perspective inside another one that transforms how things appear to you. It's when you pair this with Je that you're most likely to think in terms of the future. Je orients itself toward goals, and so when Je engages Ni, or vice versa, Ni will think in terms of how the future frames the present, which then allows you to act accordingly.

Are you sure that isn't Ne?
 

VagrantFarce

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Nov 19, 2008
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Are you sure that isn't Ne?

Ne is more "this reminds me of x, which reminds me of y, which reminds me of z". Ni is more about tearing down (or at least rejecting) reality as it presents itself and rebuilding it on your own terms. It's like choosing the lens of a camera.
 
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