# Introverted Thinking



## Elaminopy (Jun 29, 2011)

*Introverted Thinking: ISTP and INTP Types*

Like Te, Ti is a Judging function that prompts us to reason logically and impersonally. However, as a right-brain function, Ti operates differently than its left-brain counterpart.

The difference may be easiest to see by considering a game or a sport. Take baseball, for example. We know the rules of the game by way of T_e_. 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 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 T_i_. 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, Ti 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, Te 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 Ti--a way to eyeball the groceries and work out the spatial arrangements as we're packing.

Similarly, if we're connecting a splitter to a cable converter, a TV set, and two VCRs, Te 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 Ti 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, Ti always involves perceptual skills, and using it may not feel like "being reasonable." In fact, when Ti is combined with Se, as it is for ISTPs (and ESTPs), it feels a lot like instinct.

Athletes, for example, talk about being "in the zone"--a state in which the mind allegedly "gets out of the way," so the body can take over. What's actually going on is the left brain yielding its prerogatives to the right. Once left-brain logic gets out of our way, we have no expectations, so our Judgments are immediate and perceptual, and they seem reflexive.

As mentioned in this article: http://personalitycafe.com/cognitive-functions/122637-extraverted-intuition.html, 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-thing-at-a-time left brain doesn't know much about. Although prevailing gender mythology ordinarily associates intuition with women, it's interesting to note that the "intuitive" mechanical skills Ti promotes are invariably associate with men, or at least with behaviors men believe they're supposed to exhibit--such as having a "feel" for tools and equipment (being naturally "handy") or good spatial judgment (never needing to ask for directions).

When Ti is combined with Ne, as it is for the INTPs (and ENTPs), it's 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 as 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.

*Understanding Ti*

Because Ti feels instinctive, the types who use it best may be least likely to recognize it as rational. Most of them are ESTPs (about 13 percent of the population) and ISTPs (about 6 percent), who associate its right-brain character with physical dexterity and the ability to improvise. So it's easy to get the impression that ESTPs and ISTPs are pretty much alike--action-oriented sorts who inhabit a completely different world from the more intellectual INTPs.

The outward resemblance of "SP" types in general has led David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, in their famous type book _Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types_ to question whether ISTPs and Ti types at all:
Behaviorally, the ISTP is more like the ESTP than any other type. ...Jungians think ISTPs are just like INTPs with only minor differences, but this is based on the definition of ISTPs as "Ti types." INTPs are logicians, philologists, and architects in the way they think, but ISTPs are completely disinterested in these pursuits. Even a cursory observation of a few clear-cut ISTPs will show how striking the contrast, and how trivial the resemblance.​
ISTPs and ESTPs share common strengths, of course, so behavioral similarities are inevitable. But the idea that INTPs are bona fide Thinkers because they're interested in systemic logic, whereas ISTPs are motivated purely by a hunger for action, represents a misunderstanding of Ti in general.

*If I Had a Hammer...*

As indicated earlier, Ti 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.

Ti is hard to see when it's oriented by Se because it can't be isolated from the perceptual context in which it's occurring. It operates tacitly--in the background of awareness, as we're focusing directly on something else.

The classic illustration 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. We're moving our palm and fingers to change the impact of the hammer, its spatial relationship to the board, and so forth.

These perceptions aren't peripheral. They're crucial to our intended effect. And they aren't reflexive. They're _unspecified_. As we're selecting and responding to them, we're not defining them and telling ourselves about them in a left-brain way.

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. We can't specify them because we're not focusing on them directly. They're informing our actions, keeping them logically related to our goal.

Indeed, if we turn our attention to any one of them, the fluid, experiential nature of our logic disappears. For example, if we focus on the sensations of the hammer in our hand, our hammering goes awry. We've lost sight of what we're doing.

This is why STPs appear to be (and believe themselves to be) using their reflexes when they're actually using their reason. Their Judgments aren't known to them in a focused, verbal, left-brain way. They're being translated directly into physical adjustments.

Once it's clear how Introverted Judgment works, it's logical character is apparent in all the types who use it--as are the differences in their Judging motivations.

*ESTPs and ENTPs: *ESTPs and ENTPs are dominant Extraverted Perceivers. For these types, reality is immediate and perceptual engagement. They use Ti to assess or exploit a situation's potential for action or excitement.


ESTPs are risk takers, quick to see opportunity and advantage.
ENTPs are animated by systemic possibility--the variables in a situation that can exert change on the whole.
Until life pushes them to slow down, ETPs won't use Judgments to limit their intake of sensory information. They'll use it to compete wherever they happen to be.

*ISTPs and INTPs: *ISTPs and INTPs are dominant Ti types. Reality for these types is _not_ the stimulation of the external world but the tacit information that guides their direct experience--the perceptual logic of a situation. Where ETPs need action for its own sake, enjoying the thrill of challenge, ITPs need to be engaged in a way that brings their logic into play.

To be sure, ITPs enjoy competition as much as the ETPs. But they're not generally drawn to situations merely by the likelihood of risk and sensory excitement. They need to be part of a process--the dialogue between a situation's structural potential and its material realization.

One can see this more clearly in the INTPs, because Ne pushes them 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.

Although ISTPs appreciate this relationship in more direct physical terms, its fundamental nature remains a mental one. Consider the description given by Robert Pirsig, in _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_, of the dialogue between the idea of a motorcycle and the steel that gives it shape:
People who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing... that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shape--pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts--all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding see "steel" as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough... Shapes... are what you _arrive_ at, what you give to the steel... The _steel_? Hell, even the steel is out of someone's mind. There's no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a _potential_ for steel. There's nothing else there.​
This viewpoint may be recognized as typically Introverted. Unlike the Extraverted TPs, who take the material world for granted, Ti types understand reality _only_ in terms of their ability to "converse" with it, to take it part in its "becoming."

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. To practice magic, one must be in harmony with this other realm, where shape is still fluid and can be manipulated before it gets tangled up with matter and congeals into an object.

ITPs wouldn't describe their approach this way, but they understand very well what it means to be in harmony with the parts of a situation that are still in flux. When they're involved in something that interests them, they don't distinguish their thoughts from the tacit level of information they're relying on. They're part of the process, changing its nature by changing themselves.

This is one reason ITPs are so challenging for their left-brain counterparts, the Te types. ETJs make a firm split between observer and observed. They set objective goals and will sacrifice their own needs to bring them about. ITPs will do the inverse. They'll sacrifice objective considerations for the sake of a project or experience that "feels right" to them. The resulting behavior looks impulsive and may even be destructive. But the ITP's decision-making process is simply not objective.

ITPs are, of course, capable of formulating a plan and taking steps to reach a goal, but this is not their primary response to reality. They don't fully recognize their outward needs, or their responsibility to others, unless they cultivate their secondary function (Se or Ne) well enough to value experience for more than its subjective appeal. Until they manage this, they can be naive and careless about the Extraverted choices they make--particularly in the area of relationship.

Like all P types, ITPs know less about where they're headed than they do about where they don't want to be. Unlike Extraverted P types, however, they will not fake a show of interest long enough to locate the nearest door. ITPs simply won't do what strikes them as not worth doing, and they feel little need to consider the interests of others in the matter.

For example, an INTP architect I know was thoroughly nonplussed when his family expected him to show up at the hospital to see his ailing father. The idea of hanging around, saying comforting things to people, struck him as impractical. It was very clear to him that his value to the situation was to call the doctors involved and to find out what tests they'd scheduled and how they were likely to affect his father.

Although this behavior can be interpreted as defensive, touching as it does on inferior Fe, it's very much integrated with an impersonal Ti approach. Unless the man had direct involvement in the unfolding process and could exert some effect on its logical outcome, he didn't know how to relate to it.

When ITPs do feel related to a situation, they are unfailingly generous and almost without boundaries. Thus, these types can seem entirely different people in different contexts. They may be intensely private at work or at home--in the inimitable words of Ann Landers, "like a clam with a broken hinge"--but open, engaged, spontaneous, funny, and giving when they're with people whose sense of priorities is like their own.

This in itself suggest how dependent such types are on their immediate environment for their understanding of reality, and how important it is for ITPs to get enough experience outside the contexts in which they feel comfortable and at home.

*The ITP Types*

All Ti types are guided by the perceptual logic of a situation, but INTPs and ISTPs can easily appear, at first glance, to have little in common. Their similarity is not in their surface behaviors. They share a common need to make contact with the structural potential of a situation, and to have an effect on its material possibilities.

INTPs, whose Ne 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 Te types, 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.

A striking example of the type is the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whose leaky rooves are the stuff of legend, along with this disregard for the clients who objected to them. For him, the important thing was the idea a building could express. He thought of architecture as a medium that brought together the will of a specific culture and the underlying structure of nature.

Although ISTPs tend to be artisans rather than architects--athletes, surgeons, guitarists, leather workers, technical wizards, mechanics, and so forth--they experience the same kind of symbiotic relationship between their intentions and the underlying structure of a situation. For example, ISTP musicians speak about the creative merger of audience and band in a free-form joint effort.

The difference between INTPs and ISTPs in this regard is simply one of Ne versus Se. ISTPs are entirely present oriented, tied perceptually to their context. INTPs are motivated by Ne to recognize systemic possibilities. They're excited by the changes a particular environment can make in the way people think or live their lives.

This approach is not quite at home in an intellectual climate that insists on the split between observer and observed. In the Renaissance, churches were deliberately constructed with the idea that their design and structure could align a worshiper's psyche with a deeper pattern of reality. The same principle lies behind the art in traditional Islamic institutions, whose lines and dimensions are meant to bring one into harmony with the perfect design of the cosmos.

The experiential nature of their logic gives most ITPs a problem in a traditional Extraverted Judgment system of education. The type's intelligence can be experiential to the extent that he or she finds abstract reasoning tedious and difficult to understand. Even Albert Einstein, and clear-cut ITP, was reportedly an average student who struck no one as a budding genius.

ISTPs are more vulnerable than INTPs to misunderstandings along these lines because they depend on firsthand experience for what they know, and they won't relate to situations in which their body-based logic can't be utilized. Such types may excel in shop, music, and gym, where hands-on activities bring Ti into play, but they're regarded as underachievers in their academic classes. An unusual number of rock bands seem to be made up of such types, who dropped out of school for lack of discipline but happily spend eight hours a day perfecting guitar chords.

Indeed, because rock music requires the sort of physical interaction that marries art and technology, young ISTPs are often deeply invested in it. Bruce Springsteen talks about realizing one day that his guitar could speak for him--express all the things he couldn't otherwise put into words.

Most ISTPs think of tools this way, whether instrument, brush, or weapon--as extensions of themselves, part of their bodies, capable of expressing their passions and potential. There is often an erotic component to the relationship, either implicit or explicit, as befits a sensory understanding of reality in general.

*Ti in Pop Culture*

Although the Extraverted Judging nature of our cultural institutions can work to an ITP's disadvantage, it's interesting to see how popular images of Thinking in general have shifted over the last few generations to accommodate our increasing Perceptual outlook. The film _Men in Black_ offers a particularly good example of Ti writ large.

Designed as a parody of alien conspiracy theories, _Men in Black_ is about a secret federal agency that tracks the coming and going of extraterrestrials and protects the public from potentially malicious alien influence. The principles of the story are K, a senior government agent, and J, a new recruit, a former New York street cop with unusual athletic skills and a penchant for bending the rules.

The ISP nature of the movie is apparent in the fact that these latter qualities are precisely the ones the agency is looking for. J is tested along with a group of academics and military officers who are ultimately disqualified because they have a conventional approach to authority and wait for instructions before taking action.

The senior agent is an appealing variation on Sgt. Joe ("Just the facts, ma'am") Friday of the old _Dragnet_ series--terse, laconic, and war weary--but it's the differences that are telling. Friday was conceived as a Te user, and his application of the law was guided by a very sure sense of right and wrong. Many of _Dragnet_'s stories point up the ETJ's difficulty in maintaining an uninterrupted personal life in the fact of pressing impersonal priorities at work.

K is conceived as a Ti user. His job requires that he surrender _all_ claims to external identity, including relationships with others--a clear-cut reflection of the Introverted Judging idea that a moral commitment must claim the whole person, not just his or her public behaviors. Moreover, the rules K follows are not societal generalizations. They're derived from years of direct experience: his real-life knowledge of what works and what doesn't with varied alien species.

Indeed, the education of the agents' successor consists entirely of apprenticeship--trial by fire. The recruit's survival depends on his learning to improvise within the parameters of situational logic. When he attempts to ignore his supervisor's greater wisdom, mistaking it for rule-oriented inflexibility, he apprentice puts both himself and others in immediate danger.

The popularity of this movie says a great deal about how many Se types understand reality. It also tells us why so many ISTPs are bored and contemptuous of traditional standards of education and law but have superior abilities as coaches and military strategists. They excel in situations that allow them to formulate tactical parameters based on real people and real circumstances.

INTPs are less likely than ISTPs to drop out of school and seek camaraderie in sub- or countercultural arenas. They have more interest in the art of rhetorical persuasion, which gives them an incentive to write and to publish. Their process of thought, however, is wholistic and imaginal, and they can run into difficulties attempting to express their ideas in academic circles.

Albert Einstein's understanding of his work, for example, is typical of a Ti user's, particularly his idea that the driving force behind scientific research is "the cosmic religious experience." This is the sort of wholistic image that will push a scientist to seek a unified theory behind nature's infinite diversity, but it can't be fit into the Te user's general categories of observation.

Another interesting example, in this regard, is the head of the Nation of Islam, minister Louis Farrakhan. Many of Farrakhan's speeches suggest a classic INTP perspective, in that he believes the structure of American culture deforms and degrades the self-understanding of its Black constituents. Moreover, his manner of defending his ideas is not analytical but analogical, designed to unify his audience in terms of shared contextual experience.

*The Moral Perspective of Introverted Judgment*

Whatever may be said about Farrakhan's views or politics, his process of thought tells us something about Ti's prophetic power. At the societal level, this function will bear the burden of moral imperatives a culture has not acknowledged, keeping the outward face of law in touch with the immediate experience of real people.

In fact, Ti is frequently used this way by all types. A good example may be the pressure brought to bear on the medical examiner by the families of those victims lost in the crash of TWA flight 800 in 1996. The coroner had been doing autopsies methodically, attempting to find evidence of a bomb or missile, thereby delaying the identification of bodies. The families appealed to the authorities on subjective moral grounds, point out that the coroner's objective standards of investigation were not taking into account their immediate situation.

In response, the coroner adjusted his methods, much as one would respond to tacit information. The families' priorities didn't become the focal point of his attention; they helped to guide his actions, bringing the generality of the Extraverted system into balance with the issues of a real situation.

This balancing act is a normal and legitimate part of any organized community, and it's important to recognize the value of Ti in this respect. It's also important to recognize the specific needs of those who use Ti for their dominant approach to morality. Unless such types recognize the connection of Extraverted Judging generalities to their own direct experience, they will depend on parochial considerations for moral direction.

One can see from recent legal cases how easily a Perceiving society will suspect that Extraverted Judging standards are merely the fruit of someone else's perceptual experience. The idea is all but accepted that a fair verdict is possible only when a jury is made up of people of the same racial or ethnic makeup as the defendant. This perspective has also issued in the increasing practice of "jury nullification," whereby jury members attempt to rectify perceived inequities in the law by taking the defendant's direct experience into account.


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## GoldenApple (Nov 7, 2012)

Holy crap, I love this article. I'm going to do something totally lame and print it out. :bored: Only old people print stuff out. Just call me Grandma. (Or not. Definitely not.)


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## myjazz (Feb 17, 2010)

I am unsure if the usage of Judgement is towards the cognitive term of Judging or not


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## Elaminopy (Jun 29, 2011)

myjazz said:


> I am unsure if the usage of Judgement is towards the cognitive term of Judging or not


Yes, if it is capitalized.


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## Ellis Bell (Mar 16, 2012)

I vote that these threads on the cognitive functions be stickied. Definitely new, informative, and useful.


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## dimane (Jun 11, 2011)

Hey any chance we can get the developing the secondary function for Ti


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## RoSoDude (Apr 3, 2012)

A great fresh perspective on the main drive in my life. You provide excellent relevant examples and a good understanding of what it really is to be a Ti user (especially dominant). The entire article was quite thorough and went over many of the ways in which Ti manifests for different types and works in tandem with either Ne or Se. It would have been nice to see a little more about its connection to Fe (and contrast with Fi) as well as how it manifests in lower positions, but this has been covered at length in many other articles, and I think what you specifically discussed was crucial and insightful enough to merit its own thread.

What you've written is also very congruent with Socionics literature on what it calls introverted logic, in that Ti is a static element (all Ji and Pe functions are static, and all Je and Pi are dynamic). Whereas Te focuses on the logical sequence, in which a dynamic pattern is intrinsic, Ti focuses on the static situation and each of the variables at play in each moment. Static types draw from a broad set of information on just one "snapshot of reality" with their extroverted perceiving function, and from there draw an interconnected web of the factors at work for that particular moment. This is very much entwined into your argument (though I suspect it was independently inspired), and I'm very happy to see you present this integral part to Ti.

The static nature of Ti is something that has often been an issue in communication for me before. Some people, such as my ENTJ friend, say that I am too circular and repetitive in my arguments and that I take too long to say just a few things. This is because to me, my argument is not a logical sequence, but rather a map of a three-dimensional web of connections, and if I fail to elucidate any major component of my thought process, my argument will not be defensible from all possible angles.

Great article, thank you very much for posting it. I really appreciate it.


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## I Kant (Jan 19, 2013)

Introverted Thinking?

*I hear it is a type of feeling.*

*ducks and runs*


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## DoctorYikes (Nov 22, 2010)

Isn't this from Lenore's book? Seems familiar.


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## Elaminopy (Jun 29, 2011)

DoctorYikes said:


> Isn't this from Lenore's book? Seems familiar.


Yep, I typed it from the book.


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## SystemEater (Aug 5, 2012)

Ahhh. I think Lenore Thomson may be the most profoundly insightful conveyor of the cognitive functions, IMHO. Most internet-speak sources that attempt to lasso Ti, for instance, seem to take a pretty fragmented approach to explaining it. I feel a lot of explanations become a bit too reliant on marginalizing Ti as a function that serves to simply "clarify" or "succinctly explain". Those are all attributes of Ti, for sure, but they never seem to get at the core of Ti. Taking a neurological approach I think gives the argument of the functions a much more robust feel. Fully understanding Ti as being intimately dependent on certain right brain processes as they've come to be known through cognitive science seems to bring the process up to date with emerging notions. Theres also more of an interesting dichotomy that's created between Te and Ti. I get sick of seeing Te defined as the "real world logic" and Ti getting defined as the "philosophy logic". I mean, that's basically like saying "one type of thinking is useful, the other, not so much". Jung wrote about how Ti was directed towards the subject and therefore had more to do with "self knowledge", however, I sometimes think that wasn't meant to be taken so literally. Self knowledge could be interpreted to mean knowledge that pertains exclusively to selfhood, but I'd say it's probably more accurate to indicate that self-knowledge, in the Ti sense, is information that is inferred through direct observation. Perhaps the single most synonymous term for Introverted Thinking could be "inference". Of course, other functions "infer", but perhaps none as closely to the logical notion of generating new information from given premises as introverted thinking. Therefore, "self knowledge" becomes better thought of as "self generated knowledge".


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## MegaTuxRacer (Sep 7, 2011)

You Ti description was pretty good, and I learned some things taht I couldn't quite articulate previously.

Your Ne article on the other hand...I think you "get" it for the most part, but it reeks of bias. I kept thinking, "That doesn't sound like me." while I read it.


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## Elaminopy (Jun 29, 2011)

MegaTuxRacer said:


> You Ti description was pretty good, and I learned some things taht I couldn't quite articulate previously.
> 
> Your Ne article on the other hand...I think you "get" it for the most part, but it reeks of bias. I kept thinking, "That doesn't sound like me." while I read it.


Both came from Lenore Thomson's book.



RoSoDude said:


> It would have been nice to see a little more about its connection to Fe (and contrast with Fi) as well as how it manifests in lower positions, but this has been covered at length in many other articles, and I think what you specifically discussed was crucial and insightful enough to merit its own thread.


Such information may be found in the following 2 threads:

http://personalitycafe.com/istp-articles/122851-introverted-thinking-extraverted-sensation.html
http://personalitycafe.com/intp-articles/95803-lenore-thomsons-intp-type-description.html


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## MegaTuxRacer (Sep 7, 2011)

Elaminopy said:


> Both came from Lenore Thomson's book.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Her words or your interpretation?


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## FlawlessError (Aug 29, 2012)

I do not have the will, nor mental energy to read this all. This seems brilliant though, hats off to OP.


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## Elaminopy (Jun 29, 2011)

MegaTuxRacer said:


> Her words or your interpretation?


Her words, though I used Ti, Se, etc., where she used Introverted Thinking, Extraverted Sensing, etc.


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## Brian1 (May 7, 2011)

Carl Jung speculates that the Introverted Thinking type is akin to Kant and the Critique of Knowledge, and ideas....I've been reading up on this lately. And the Introverted Thinking type will focus inwards.

I'm not the best at this, but this is in the Portable Jung, which is a great source.

As an ESTP I have introverted thinking...I'm getting pretty confused on this.

More thoughts:

I've always categorized things in my life, in a logical fashion, this is Ti.Being from a community of NFs apparently Feeling is preferred to Thinking,and because NF does not express Ti, at all, you can come out looking cold and logical.... And there's lots more trouble in here, when the two hit. note I'm not trying to attack the NF community,just piecing my life together.


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## Aquarian (Jun 17, 2012)

Elaminopy said:


> The difference may be easiest to see by considering a game or a sport. Take baseball, for example. We know the rules of the game by way of T_e_.* 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 base on his way around the diamond, we can logically conclude he's out.
> 
> ...





> 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*.


Yes. Yes. FREAKING YES.

This is gorgeously explained (said the INFJ qualitative researcher whose Ti-tert is a huge part of my cognitive life). Ti can only work with experiential/lived data! Ti is incredibly hands-on and contextual. Yes.


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