Take baseball, for example. We know the rules of the game by way of Extraverted Thinking. Like all general standards, the rules exist apart from the real-life experience. They specify the impersonal structural relationships that constitute a game's meaning.
Once we recognize these relationships, we have an objective basis for Judging what happens in a game. No matter who a player is, whether we like him or not, or what we believe about his intentions, if he doesn't touch the base on his way around the diamond, we can logically conclude he's out.
But let's say it's the top of the ninth, the score is tied, and we're actually rounding second base. The Judgments we're making -- whether to stay at second or to try for a home run -- also require impersonal logic. But knowing how baseball games are supposed to be played won't do us much good. What we want is subjective logic -- a way to coordinate our behaviors logically with immediate sensory data: the position of the ball, the skill of the batter coming up, the distance we can probably slide, the actions of the other players.
This is the province of Introverted Thinking. When we use it, we're not structuring experience before it actually exists. We're engaged by conditions here and now, and we're adjusting to them in light of their impact on our goal.
As a right-brain function, Introverted Thinking is not conceptual and linear. It's body based and wholistic. It operates by way of visual, tactile, or spatial cues, inclining us to reason experientially rather than analytically. There are countless situations in which subjective Judgment is preferable to -- and more effective than -- the objective sort.
For example, if we're in a supermarket, trying to fit all our groceries into one bag, Extraverted Thinking is too exacting. We'd have to buy a ruler, measure the boxes, cartons, and coffee cans, and relate the numbers to the volume of our container. What we want here is Introverted Thinking -- a way to eyeball the groceries and work out the spatial arragements as we're packing.
Similarly, if we're connecting a splitter to a cable converted, a TV set, and two VCRs, Extraverted Thinking is too complicated. We don't want instructions that divide the task into linear steps, such as "Connect TV Output A to Splitter Input A, and Splitter Output B to Input A on VCR-1." We want a diagram of the completed project, so Introverted Thinking will kick in and "just do it."
The left brain, with its one-thing-at-a-time approach to life, requires exact predictability before it takes action. This is a clear advantage in situations we don't know much about. As long as we have a set of instructions or understand the principle involved, we don't need firsthand experience in order to proceed. However, when an enterprise involves random data, or there are many variables to consider, left-brain logic has no recourse.
The right brain, with its all-at-once approach to life, doesn't require exact predictability before it takes action. Its decisions are based on probabilities, and it leaves room for the random and the unexpected. But right-brain logic does require hands-on experience. We have to recognize, in the midst of action, which variables are best taken into account and which are irrelevant to our goal.
Thus, Introverted Thinking always involves perceptual skills, and using it may not feel like "being reasonable." In fact, when Introverted Thinking is combined with Extraverted Sensation, as it is for the ISTPs (and ESTPs), it feels a lot like instinct.
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As mentioned in the chapter on Extraverted Intuition, those types who favor right-brain functions are frequently described as "intuitive." The word has become a kind of catchall term for cognitive processes the one-at-at-time left brain doesn't know much about...
When Introverted Thinking is combined with Extraverted Intuition, as it is for the INTPs (and ENTPs), its cognitive nature is more apparent, NTPs have a strong interest in patterns and their structural relationship to an immediate context, that fuels careers in architecture and production editing. But the logic of NTPs is equally equipped on direct experience and body-based skills. INTP music producers, for example, can "hear" in their minds how different combinations of effects will contribute to the sound and energy of an instrumental pattern, and their Judgments translate directly into hand movements on a console.
Because Introverted Thinking feels instinctive, the types who use it best may be least likely to recognize it as rational...
As indicated earlier, Introverted Thinking is not just a matter of responding to immediate perceptual stimuli. It's a decision-making process. When we're Thinking in an Introverted way, we're coordinating our behaviors with the variables in a situation related to our intended effect. This is a matter of logic, limitation, and goal orientation -- all the things we associate with a rational approach to life.
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The classic example of "tacit" information is the act of hammering a nail into a board. Our attention is on the nail and what we're doing to it. But we're also responding to all sorts of perceptual data relevant to our goal. As the nail's angle changes, we're making adjustments, appraising the distance between our present state and the completed task...
This is what constitutes our right-brain process of Judgment -- the unspecified perceptions that are important to us, here and now, in light of our intentions...
... Intuition pushes [INTPs] to explore the idea of structural potential in its own right. This is why such types seem more conventionally rational than the ISTPs. Such types will talk about the relationship between form and context, and they'll wrestle with its implications by way of architecture, design, systems analysis, or the physical sciences.
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This way of seeing the world is not unlike the sort described by alchemists or magicians, who say that the realm of "patterns" exists on a different plane from the materials they inform...
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INTPs, whose Intuition prompts an interest in pattern itself, are fascinated by the internal architecture of systems, the fluid relationship between form and context that determines a living process. This interest can manifest itself in art, architecture, design, or musical composition, but it also moves INTPs into fields like physics, economics, and mathematics.
It should be emphasized that these types are not like Extraverted Thinkers, who break objects down into parts and see how they fit together. INTPs are interested in the active relationship of a pattern to its immediate environment, and they try to get at its essential nature by making models. In many ways, the unfolding dance of variables between a design and its surrounding conditions is more important to them than the practicality of the objects they create.