Wait a damn minute... if Ni has logical properties by itself, why--say, in an INTJ--would a "deductive" Te play Ni's game? If Ni is being all inductive, why would a deductive Te not get just as offended as the average INTP sitting around trying to listen to an INTJ? A deductive system, by definition, will reject an induction.
In any type, isn't the auxiliary supposed to balance the dominant--to provide focus and structure which by itself teh dominant doesn't have?
Induction and deduction actually work incredibly well together. Inductive leaps are essentially the premises that Thinking uses to deduce from. Once Thinking finishes a deduction, Intuition can expand the scope or change the topic entirely, providing Thinking with new deductive problems.
All reasoning is some induction + some deduction. That's what N and T do, and that's why NTs are usually good at abstract true/false reasoning.
Or to put it another way, if Ni in INXJs has some logical properties of its own, what does Si in ISXJs have?
Si also has inductive properties, but it stays in the realm of the concrete. Again, perceiving overall provides premises for judging to deduce from. Feeling is also a deductive function, by the way, in which the outputs are good/bad instead of true/false. In computer science terms, perceiving provides the arguments (premises, inputs, whatever) to a judging function, which merely parses the inputs with a bunch of if/then statements and produces a deductive output.
This is a point I've been making throughout the thread -- Feeling is
rational. It just approaches different sorts of problems and outputs different sorts of answers than Thinking.
And for that matter, why doesn't an INFJ just explode? Their Ni is doing some kind of inductive trick, the Fe is making emotional judgments about it, and Ti is sitting in the background weeping because none of it can make any sense--there being such rapid and wild leaps from any decision to the next... Ask an INTP--Ti recoils at induction.
That's a ludicrous point. If you think for a minute that Fs aren't capable of logical thinking, you need to restructure your understanding of the MBTI. MBTI is about preference, not ability. It's descriptive, not predictive.
Thinking is necessary, just like all other functions. Just because you prefer a different process doesn't mean you have no ability to Think.
To think that Ti is sitting in the background weeping is entirely missing the point. Ti does the same thing for INFJs as for INTPs. It makes true/false deductions based on an internal standard (or framework, or whatever you want to call it). There's no reason that an INFJ couldn't be very logical. I personally am an example of this, as a math/logic freak...
I dunno. I'm just running down the concepts as they appear to me. And Ni, as far as I know, is unregulated extrapolation. Nothing at all stops it leaping from "big fish" to "chocolate soap" unless and until some exterior judgment function steps in. To say that Ni has regulated logical properties of its own kinda defeats the purpose of systematising the existence of other judgment functions into a whole MBTI story, doesn't it?
No no. Intuition is certainly not unbounded -- otherwise it'd be almost useless. First, there are two kinds of Intuition, extroverted and introverted, which have different focuses -- extroverted focuses on breadth, introverted on depth -- Ne makes inductions about environmental information, Ni makes inductions about the internal state, as in, the current thought process + unconscious state. Second, Intuitive leaps have to come from somewhere -- they also use premises to guess a conclusion from. Intuition has a massive storehouse of information, refined throughout a lifetime -- it would look like a giant web of concepts, with hundreds of connections from concept to concept. New Intuitions are based on this structure.
(Edit: perceiving is defined as unconscious and judging conscious, if that helps at all. So anything unconscious is by definition perceiving and everything conscious blah blah.)
Again, I don't see what problem Thinking would have with inductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is incapable of expanding scope or coming up with anything new. Unless there's constant induction going on, Thinking is just going to sit there with no problems to solve.
A point I do want to hammer home, though, is that
everyone uses all functions. Just because someone is an F doesn't mean they don't constantly use Thinking. It doesn't mean Thinking somehow is kept in a prison in the mind, constantly beaten down until its will is broken. In fact, I know plenty of Fs that constantly outperform most Ts in logic puzzles or math or physics or computer science
(coughmyselfcough).
That really isn't, you know. In any reasoning system at all, evaluations are just evaluations. True/false, good/bad, beautiful/ugly... they're all essentially (well, syntactically) the same as "positive"/"negative". It's not entirely suitable to use one positive term in place of another, but there's an extra thing in INFJs that makes it okay, I think...
Yes. This is an essential point. Thinking and Feeling don't really do different sorts of things. They just focus on different sorts of problems. You could really just use the overarching term Judging. Thinking is just the part of judging that works from a framework of True/False, Feeling is the part that works from the framework of Good/Bad. But they both take data, parse it, and deductively spit out results.
INFJs don't deal only in "subjective good" and "subjective bad", do you guys. You deal in what's really good and really bad. Fe provides a judgment, and months and years of experience provide a library of insights that sharpen that Fe judgment even further... AND Ti checks truth. So INFJs at their best do not merely say "it's good/bad"; they can and rightly do say, "It's true that this is good/bad."
I don't know what you're really trying to say. Good/Bad is always going to be subjective, because it always depends on premises. You can say, given these ethical principles, x is wrong or x is right. But you can never call x in and of itself wrong or right. Just like you can't call a concept true unless you define the problem you're approaching about the concept first.
Bad.