It is only if there was any sort of judgement attached to the fact that the average Feeler is typically less likely to rely on logic and more likely to take things personally than the average Thinker. What's wrong with making an appeal to ethos or pathos before logos? What I take exception to is when people are clearly appealing to the former two, and expect it to be taken as the latter. That's troublesome to me.
[...]
My point was less about misconceptions and more about misplaced values. Ideally, we wouldn't disparage the Feeling viewpoint such that Feelers felt they had to be anything but themselves. The contempt in my previous post was leveled squarely at pretenders--those with a clear preference for Fe or Fi trying pass off those things as Te or Ti who get butt hurt when you make the mistake of treating them like you would another Thinker.
I'm going to have a hard time phrasing my thoughts here, but I'll give it a shot.
It boils down to the sentiment of: if we didn't pre-judge every member of the type as though they were
what we conceive of as the
average member of the type, we wouldn't be dissuading folks from labeling themselves as such-and-such a type.
To that end, your statements here about the average are arguably true. But statistical syllogisms are nasty,
nasty beasts and can lead us to faulty conclusions about individual members of a set. Sometimes, those conclusions are subconscious and so they only indirectly affect our interactions, but they still ought to be called out and checked.
Think of it this way: me masquarading, for instance, as a an ENFJ. I'd go around and being as blunt and oblivious to social cues as I usually am, doing my Te/Fi thing, and basically bastardizing the whole Fe-thing in the meanwhile. And if you or any of the other ENFJs on the site came across me being as blatantly not Fe as I am, I think you'd fully be within rights to be annoyed enough to call me out on it.
This gives me the opportunity to rephrase the above in a different way.
If one labels themselves as an ENFJ and they act in non-ENFJ ways, and if we treat type as an objective construct
(laffo), there are a few possible explanations. Either they're not ENFJ, or our definition of "ENFJ" and "non-ENFJ" are off-kilter and need to be adjusted.
We're not as open to that second possibility as we ought to be, and I believe that it's much higher than we think. Our working definitions are probably too narrow.
After all, sentiments such as
You're absolutely correct. Most ENTJ descriptions jive with me in a very limited way.
indicate that those who write descriptions--and also, presumably, most of us--know jack shit about what it actually means to be a certain type, or at least how broad the types actually
are.