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[MBTI General] Thinking vs Feeling...a false dichotomy?

Kalach

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Well that's why we're disagreeing. You are saying Feeling results in judgments, I'm saying Feeling IS the judgments.

And by extension, Thinking is conclusions?

What if I said feeling is an affective state? It results in judgment: you're affected this way so you know something is "negative" or you're affected that way so you know something is "positive". As to what is "Feeling" under Jung, dunno, haven't looked it up.

This exchange didn't have to be so adversarial.

(That is an INTJ speaking?)

A genuine, dyed-in-the-wool, card carrying INFJ I know often speaks in terms of "my thinking" and "this is true" and so on. (She also says things like "I just know...", but be that as it may because I sometimes say things like that too.) And if I wanted to have a new one ripped for me I could attempt to slag off her thinking as "Ya, it's all just your subjective opinion, boo!" To which she would, after nailing my feet to the floor and gently placing hot coals in my gouged out eye sockets, reply, "that I process my impressions and order them via a judgment function that pays attention to what is and is not real means I am just as rational as you, and if you want to test anything I say, you are more than welcome to have your ass handed to you when we both find out I was right all along."

I have the strong impression that feeling judgment in an INFJ is hardly so superficial as "I just feel it." More like, "I just feel it, and it's stood the test of a huge amount of information I have stored and processed about people and what they really do." Or something like that. (I'm an amateur so decide for yourself if any of that makes sense.)

Short version: according to the normal, non-MBTI definition of the word "think", INFJs do a very great deal of thinking.


Is the following a reasonable short-hand test for INTJ vs INFJ?

"Do you think about people you know or about the ideas behind your work?"
 

redacted

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And by extension, Thinking is conclusions?

Thinking and Feeling are both judgments. Feeling says "x is good" or "x is bad". Thinking says "x is logically correct" or "x is logically incorrect".

What if I said feeling is an affective state? It results in judgment: you're affected this way so you know something is "negative" or you're affected that way so you know something is "positive". As to what is "Feeling" under Jung, dunno, haven't looked it up.

If it's deductive, it's feeling or thinking. If it's inductive, it's sensing or intuition.

(That is an INTJ speaking?)

No, my whole point is that I am an INFJ that uses Thinking more than Feeling. Just not Extroverted Thinking. I use Introverted Thinking and Extroverted Feeling. I don't fit with the descriptions of INTJ because those descriptions talk about Extroverted Thinking and Introverted Feeling.

Is the following a reasonable short-hand test for INTJ vs INFJ?

"Do you think about people you know or about the ideas behind your work?"

That's the exact problem the OP was talking about. How is that an OR question? I definitely do both. A lot. There's no reason those two things should be thought of as opposing.
 

Orangey

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Is the following a reasonable short-hand test for INTJ vs INFJ?

"Do you think about people you know or about the ideas behind your work?"

What does the bit in bold actually mean? Blame it on my poor N usage, but I'm having a hard time processing the meaning of that statement.
 

Kalach

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Blame it on poor Si... I haven't given much of a damn about the detailed spec... like, say...

An INTJ will work by producing the deeper theory of his work, right? So will an INFJ but the focus will be the people that work there, right? The deeper theory behind who they are, what they're doing, where the job is going... right? The INTJ will be all about the personless concepts. Or if there's people involved and maybe there has to be some question of motivation, the INTJs still going to be coming up with theories of efficient processes that people can join in with because the processes are so damn good and not because the process has been tailored to what the people need in their deep hearts. Right?

And what's wrong with being an INFJ that thinks? Ti's the third process. It's what gets you high. Ev, maybe you're just really keyed in to what's right and proper for you to be doing--Ni's chugging along, Fe's doing a bang up job of judging, and Ti's kicking in adding in the finishing touches. Why not?

Are you maybe buying into the dominant world paradigm about thinking being more respectable than feeling? There isn't a whole lot of good media out there about feeling as an accurate and insightful function... so...

There's a reason INFJs are seers... because they're often right. And it's not magic. It's a lot of hard working and accurate processing. That's what it looks like to me. When I meet up with the INFJs I know, I recognise them as people like me, thinkers. (And as somebody on here has been saying recently, INXJs aren't really thinkers at all, so why don't we just call each other moonbeam dancers?)
 

Jack Flak

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I don't have the wherewithall to handle that right now, on top of everything else. *exit*
 

Kalach

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Incidentally, you know there's two kinds of logic, right? Deductive and Inductive. Deductive logic--as a logic system--is rock solid: if Y is deduced from X, then when X is true, Y definitely is true too. Inductive logic--as a logical system--is weasly: if X is true, then Y is very likely true too.

My naive understanding of MBTI stuff correlates Ti with Deductive logic and Te with Inductive. Ni, as far as I understand, doesn't have any kind of logical properties at all. It's all just, gee whiz, wow, check out the wonderful strands of stuff that float of this thing... It's just a mass of could be's, might be's, possibilitiez. That mass is totally undifferentiated without the imposition of some order--in the INJ cases, Te or Fe.

For INTJs Ni goes "wow, what a blast" and Te says, "Yeah, and it gets refined like so," and then Fi chimes in with "I concur, and you better do it too, :sob:"

For INFJs, Ni goes "wow", Fe goes, "Yeah, and it gets refined like so", and then Ti chimes in with... what? A categorisation of the Fe result into true's and false's?

But none of it is so simple and discrete. Ni doesn't work on it's own, the judgment function is always there differentiating immediately, and guiding Ni attention, and the third function is always there too sitting in the background guiding too. It's all a mix. It's all a constant processing activity. It's all "thinking." How do you tell the difference between Fe reflection on a topic with a Ti guiding hand, and a Ti focus on categories and details? (Or, hell, you hear about these people with different function orders--maybe, Evan, you're one of those. What's a good way of finding out?)

Either way, since Ni is the dominant in us, I still like being a moonbeam dancer. We're precise and beautiful in our movement.
 

Orangey

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Blame it on poor Si... I haven't given much of a damn about the detailed spec... like, say...

An INTJ will work by producing the deeper theory of his work, right? So will an INFJ but the focus will be the people that work there, right? The deeper theory behind who they are, what they're doing, where the job is going... right? The INTJ will be all about the personless concepts. Or if there's people involved and maybe there has to be some question of motivation, the INTJs still going to be coming up with theories of efficient processes that people can join in with because the processes are so damn good and not because the process has been tailored to what the people need in their deep hearts. Right?

I sincerely appreciate the attempt at clarification, but this paragraph just made my head explode like the jury members on South Park after hearing Johnny Cochran's Chewbacca defense.
 

Kollin

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I agree with this. I think modern psychology has totally misunderstood the role of emotions in the way we, human beings think and feel.

Maybe a better way to describe the difference is taking care of others vs taking care of yourself. We all know of people who do things because they consider other people's needs and feelings, then there are people who only worry about themselves and everyone else be damned.

Another thing is that we can control how we feel about things more than we think.
 

Orangey

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I agree with this. I think modern psychology has totally misunderstood the role of emotions in the way we, human beings think and feel.

Maybe a better way to describe the difference is taking care of others vs taking care of yourself. We all know of people who do things because they consider other people's needs and feelings, then there are people who only worry about themselves and everyone else be damned.

Another thing is that we can control how we feel about things more than we think.

Um, who are you agreeing with exactly? Because if it's the OP, I think the bit in bold is precisely what the OP wished to get away from.
 

Kalach

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I sincerely appreciate the attempt at clarification, but this paragraph just made my head explode like the jury members on South Park after hearing Johnny Cochran's Chewbacca defense.

INXJs take in information and produce rich theories of what it all means. They produce those theories for the purpose of perhaps one day doing something. Only they don't so often do something as they do go over the theory a few more times. If pressed, they'll produce advice. (We're not E's, our action is more often to advise than to do, to orchestrate rather than to enact...).

Yes or No?

INFJ focus is inside the people around them (those people's hearts and souls and the origin of their deeds.) INTJ focus is outside the people around them (those people's computers, their chairs, their military maneuvers).

And there is a fine and fabulous distinction to be made between thinking and feeling. I don't know what it is, but there is one. Something like feeling is affective and thinking is... deductive?

The distinction is obscured by no INXJ ever really using exactly only one function at a time. Dunno about INXPs. They may get away with it somehow. In any case, perhaps Thinking and Feeling are convenient labels for when one function is clearly the more controlling.

I may be making this up.
 

Kollin

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Um, who are you agreeing with exactly? Because if it's the OP, I think the bit in bold is precisely what the OP wished to get away from.

I'm kind of agreeing with the opening post...But I'm confused though...is this supposed to be about gaining insight into ourselves or political ideologies?

If that's what he's trying to get away from what exactly is he or she suggesting?
 

Orangey

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I'm kind of agreeing with the opening post...But I'm confused though...is this supposed to be about gaining insight into ourselves or political ideologies?

If that's what he's trying to get away from what exactly is he or she suggesting?

Ehm...I got the impression that the OP was saying that the T/F dichotomy shouldn't be characterized as "serves others"/"serves self" because it is inaccurate. I then got the impression that you were agreeing with this very characterization. That led me to wonder (and subsequently question) why you thought you were agreeing with the OP. Here:

What the OP says:

There are those who take others into consideration and there are those who consider only themselves. But to call those who consider others feelers and those who consider themselves logical is an invalid inference.

And here's what you said:

I agree with this. I think modern psychology has totally misunderstood the role of emotions in the way we, human beings think and feel.

Maybe a better way to describe the difference is taking care of others vs taking care of yourself. We all know of people who do things because they consider other people's needs and feelings, then there are people who only worry about themselves and everyone else be damned.

Totally opposite thoughts, yet you thought you were agreeing...And (s)he is suggesting that we stop using this as a legitimate way to distinguish between thinking and feeling. (S)he is also suggesting that the original reason that we currently think of thinking and feeling in this way is because of class based ideological domination.
 

SolitaryWalker

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I've thought on and off about the dichotomy between thinking and feeling for about five years now. My ideas on it have evolved over the years. Initially, I thought the thinking-feeling dichotomy was a good way to compartmentalize the way decisions are oriented by different people. Then, for a period of time I came to the conclusion that it's possible for there to be no dichotomy between thoughts and feelings--that a person could fall in love with an idea. More recently, a few ideas have emerged. First, that this "thinking-feeling" binary distinction is based on a gross oversimplification about the way people make decisions. Even the horribly stupid questions on the Myers-Briggs test like "do you make decisions with your head or heart?" is based on a fictitious dichotomy. No one makes decisions with their heart, all decisions stem from the brain. There are those who take others into consideration and there are those who consider only themselves. But to call those who consider others feelers and those who consider themselves logical is an invalid inference. Logic is only a system invented by and used for humans. If a basic assumption is that humans ought to pursue their own self-interest and maximize utility, as Adam Smith posits, then a person's logic should be oriented toward the self. If however we hold the basic assumption that decisions should be oriented around the self and the group (as John Nash posits) than the logic we employ will reflect this end goal which differs from Smith's.

Then we get into the "why" of how logic came to be annexed with self-interest. And I'd argue it has evolved this way primarily due to the influence of the wealthy class. In this sense, the wealthy have brainwashed society into believing that the "Right" is logical and anyone who is on the progressive "Left" who's actually trying to put a little more food on the table or raise the minimum wage must be an illogical feeling type. Such fictitious lies don't square well with economic and social realities, and I am here to expose this myth.

Thoughts?


It is true that Thoughts and Feelings are intimately intertwined, however, from this it does not follow that there is no distinction between Thinking and Feeling.

Thinking by definition is a tendency towards dispassionate contemplation and Feeling is a tendency towards processing of emotion. We do both when we engage with most activities, though clearly in some cases one of the two aspects is more emphasized than the other. For example, when we play a chess or solve a mathematical problem, Thinking is more emphasized than Feeling. When we read poetry or listen to music, Feeling is more emphasized than Thinking. In the first case, Feeling is part of the procedure because the person derives a positive sentiment from doing the proof. Thinking is part of the procedure in the second case because the person has a clear idea of the work of art he is enjoying. In order for him to enjoy poetry or a painting, he must have an understanding of what the poetry is saying on the basic level or what the painting portrays.
 

SillySapienne

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I feel, therefore I am.

Thoughts, what are these thoughts that you speak of?

:D
 

Amargith

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I feel, therefore I am.

Thoughts, what are these thoughts that you speak of?

:D

You know, those things that get in the way every time of your feelings and make you doubt what you *feel* is the right course of action? Oh right, they're best dealt with by not acknowledging their existence, my bad :doh:
 
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