Okay, so I thought I'd join in the fun and have my own "wacko" theory of +/-, if anyone cares to know. I'll just ramble on for awhile, but I promise that if you're interested in cycles and +/-, there are some ideas you may find interesting. For a pretentious title, you can call it the "Theory of Cycles," or "Model C," if that's not already taken. If it is, call it C+- . I know Smilex talked a lot about cycles, so some of that may be related, but I'm not sure.

In my opinion, the problem with much of the discussion on +/- is simply that people don't discuss *why* they think + is expressed a certain way and why - is expressed another way, but instead simply say what they think they are and leave it at that.

The initial case for even considering +/- is that it has some notational usefulness. In addition to allowing the base function to serve as a shorthand for the entire type as it appears labcoat and perhaps others have begun to do at least in part , the process-result dichotomy on which +/- is based is the only dichotomy that can represent how functions blocked with other functions modify those functions, IF one must honor the rule that the functions blocked with each other must be on different sides of the dichotomy. So mathematically, there's something to +/-. Only the meta-interpretation is in question.

As I stated in a previous mostly unread thread, the only rational way I can see to justify the interpretation of process-result as relating at all to "process" "result" "+" "-" and the other words that have been used is to presume a natural cycle between rational and irrational functions, being N>T>S>F>N, which is one of only two such cycles. (Was this called concretizing in one of Smilex's threads? Everything I mention about this could perhaps also happen in reverse if one goes the other direction; perhaps it may go in reverse for result types, for example.)

A rough interpretation of this cycle is that ideas need to be structured, structure needs to be implemented, implementation must be humanized, and human potential must be discovered. The interpretation of + and - then is simply that "-" is the next problem to solve given "+"…or given that there's +, we must then deal with it somehow, according to the next phase in the cycle, and that "dealing with" is what "-" means. (This is different from other interpretation of + and - that have floated around, which in my view sometimes seem to be more about what the notational symbols "+" and "-" connote by themselves than about anything directly actually relevant to Socionics.)