Cognitive psychology vs. Socionics

[Singu]

Psychology is never empirical. Even if you could do brain scans on people and see everything that's going on, you need someone's subjective report to know that they're depressed in the first place, and you need that subjective report to be able to know how to correlate brain states to it. The brain reflects everything in the physical world. To completely understand it, we'd have to understand everything in the physical world and then there'd have to be no new things. But there are always new things just as a matter of course. People won't understand my argument because it's basically the same fundamental argument as ultrafinitism but it's true. Abstractions are not real. Abstract means "to take away." But you have to take away from something. If you take away everything, there's nothing left.

Well that's probably in the realm of explanations. Socionics fails at the explanation department, because it doesn't give a convincing explanation on why people feel a certain way or behave in a certain way.

Saying "Your depression is caused by Fi" is about as good as an explanation as saying "Your depression is caused by the goblins in your head". They're both based on an observation that indeed, there appears to be all sorts of behavioral and outward manifestations of a depression in a person, but neither are actually providing any convincing explanation as to what is causing it, and why.

The reason why self-reporting isn't always reliable is because, there are all sorts of reasons and explanations on why they feel the way that they do. The explanation could be this or this or this or that. It's very difficult to just pin down to a single explanation since there are so many.

So what we would need to do is understand exactly what is depression at the most fundamental level. We would need an explanatory "theory of depression" and even "theory of consciousness". Maybe that could be achieved by cognitive psychology and cognitive science, with the aid of things like AI programming.

[Pallas]

Well that's probably in the realm of explanations. Socionics fails at the explanation department, because it doesn't give a convincing explanation on why people feel a certain way or behave in a certain way.

Saying "Your depression is caused by Fi" is about as good as an explanation as saying "Your depression is caused by the goblins in your head". They're both based on an observation that indeed, there appears to be all sorts of behavioral and outward manifestations of a depression in a person, but neither are actually providing any convincing explanation as to what is causing it, and why.

How is "your depression is caused by brain chemicals" any better? Never mind that it's not. If people feel angsty, that has to do with their lives. If they feel lethargic, that's a sign of illness, although that might be caused by something to do with their lives itself. Correlation is not causation, and correlation is all science can ever find. Science is instrumental. It doesn't give you a worldview. The worldviews of scientists are not proven by their work.

[Exodus]

How is socionics better than a sandwich? You can't eat it. Checkmate.

[Singu]

How is "your depression is caused by brain chemicals" any better? Never mind that it's not. If people feel angsty, that has to do with their lives. If they feel lethargic, that's a sign of illness, although that might be caused by something to do with their lives itself. Correlation is not causation, and correlation is all science can ever find. Science is instrumental. It doesn't give you a worldview. The worldviews of scientists are not proven by their work.

You didn't read my post properly, or I didn't make my point clear. Yes, there are many explanations, and that's why the Socionics explanation is not necessarily the correct one, and choosing one explanation out of many equally valid explanations is irrational. What makes one theory more likely or plausible is that it has a better explanation, AND have perhaps survived numerous tests and experiments, and have survived falsification attempts. What makes a theory "good" is that it's "hard to vary" in the sense that changing the details would ruin the explanation.

Obviously, correlation is not all science can ever find, or else science would be pretty crappy. One job of science is to rigorously prove that a certain finding is indeed caused by causation and not mere correlation. That's why science keeps finding alternative explanations, it could be this or this or that. How to find out its correlation is by explaining its mechanics of exactly why and how.

Instrumentalism is just one branch of scientific philosophy of pragmatism, and it's not science as a whole. In fact, instrumentalism may be considered to be bad science.

[Bertrand]

choosing one explanation out of many equally valid explanations is irrational

wut

if they're truly equally valid it just means the choice is illusory and the explanations are isomorphic. its like using two different words for the same thing. which is precisely how Ti gets confused, because they frequently make distinctions without differences. if they're not equally valid then it presupposes a standard by which to judge between them, that standard is usefulness. science is true inasmuch as it is useful, something is not useful inasmuch as it is scientific. get your logic straight

fuck

[Pallas]

You didn't read my post properly, or I didn't make my point clear. Yes, there are many explanations, and that's why the Socionics explanation is not necessarily the correct one, and choosing one explanation out of many equally valid explanations is irrational. What makes one theory more likely or plausible is that it has a better explanation, AND have perhaps survived numerous tests and experiments, and have survived falsification attempts. What makes a theory "good" is that it's "hard to vary" in the sense that changing the details would ruin the explanation.

Obviously, correlation is not all science can ever find, or else science would be pretty crappy. One job of science is to rigorously prove that a certain finding is indeed caused by causation and not mere correlation. That's why science keeps finding alternative explanations, it could be this or this or that. How to find out its correlation is by explaining its mechanics of exactly why and how.

Instrumentalism is just one branch of scientific philosophy of pragmatism, and it's not science as a whole. In fact, instrumentalism may be considered to be bad science.

I didn't say science should be instrumental, just that it is. Falsification makes it instrumental by default, because falsification forces the whole of science into a finite number of steps where things can never be proven right, only wrong, and that's the definition of instrumentalism. If you consider instrumentalism bad science, you have to re-define science to not revolve around falsification. That basically throws you back to the Romantics and Idealists though, which is what Popper invented falsification to disprove. So do you want Frankenstein's monster or do you want Marx? You gotta pick.

[Singu]

Instrumentalism is the belief that you first make an observation, and then you make generalized statements. It's a kind of empiricism in that you can ever know things from experiences based on the senses.

You're basically critical of instrumentalism, and your criticism is in line with Karl Popper's criticism of instrumentalism. Yes, Karl Popper "the falsfication guy" was critical of instrumentalism because he believed in the power of deduction. So actually if you wanted to know more you could read Popper, which is actually very interesting.

It would be wrong to say "science is instrumental", because science also uses other methods like deduction to reach to a conclusion. Instrumentalism may be a popular method, but it's not the only method.

Falsfication is a very important foundation of science, but like I said, it can be supplemented by "explanatory power", which is the ability to explain a phenomenon in a rational manner, because we live in a logically consistent and coherent world where there is causality and things don't just happen randomly without any explanation as to why. So yes, it seems like potentially anything can be explained in this world, if we try hard enough. But obviously a theory means nothing if it doesn't survive any tests and experiments.

[Pallas]

Instrumentalism is the belief that you first make an observation, and then you make generalized statements. It's a kind of empiricism in that you can ever know things from experiences based on the senses.

You're basically critical of instrumentalism, and your criticism is in line with Karl Popper's criticism of instrumentalism. Yes, Karl Popper "the falsfication guy" was critical of instrumentalism because he believed in the power of deduction. So actually if you wanted to know more you could read Popper, which is actually very interesting.

It would be wrong to say "science is instrumental", because science also uses other methods like deduction to reach to a conclusion. Instrumentalism may be a popular method, but it's not the only method.

Falsfication is a very important foundation of science, but like I said, it can be supplemented by "explanatory power", which is the ability to explain a phenomenon in a rational manner, because we live in a logically consistent and coherent world where there is causality and things don't just happen randomly without any explanation as to why. So yes, it seems like potentially anything can be explained in this world, if we try hard enough. But obviously a theory means nothing if it doesn't survive any tests and experiments.

It's still not science per se though. Popper seriously made his theory to disprove Marx. "Explanatory power" is a leap of faith, and a kind of obviously wrong one. Everyone is getting their shorts in a knot trying to prove string theory because otherwise quantum physics and relativity don't have "explanatory power" due to being contradictory, but then string theory is unfalsifiable metaphysics that just happens to involve a lot of advanced mathematics. Newtonian physics contradicts all the other physics since it's an approximation or whatever and that's the most widely-used physics, so which physics is the most correct? Physics is based on math and there's Gödel's incompleteness theorem stopping math itself from describing anything. So why should I take my leap of faith at "explanatory power" like Popper and not divine order like Newton or pragmatism like William James or the power of the human heart like Goethe? All of those people have made advances in science that still haven't been really surpassed and discarded while working in a non-Popperian framework. Workers of the world, unite.

[Singu]

Anyway, the whole point of the question "What causes depression?" and its answer "Depression is caused by Fi" being replaceable and inter-changeable with "goblins in your head" "magic" or even, "brain chemicals", is because the correct answer is: "We don't know". We don't know until we actually investigate and look into why and how and what is causing depression in a person. We currently don't know the exact mechanisms behind what exactly causes depression, because there is not yet a "theory of depression" that can explain depression in the most fundamental way.

So "because of Fi" becomes a catch-all phrase that can literally explain anything, so you might as well as say "because of magic". It seems like an explanation, but it's not actually explaining anything, or even says anything about depression for that matter, and it's not getting an iota close to the reality of the situation. This is actually a hindsight bias, because you are ever only "explaining" things in hindsight. It says nothing about the predictability of depression. Saying that "depression is caused by Fi" says nothing about what causes it, and it says nothing about how to anticipate depression in the future.

[Bertrand]

depression being caused by Fi is only interchangeable with goblins in your head because its wrong, which is why no one says depression is caused by Fi. but even if they did they probably mean something like "depression inasmuch as it is the ethical suspicion that nothing matters is experienced under the domain we label Fi as a form of introverted ethical judgement." in other words, depressive thoughts are Fi thoughts inasmuch as they're introverted ethical judgements. Fi doesn't "cause" anything because functions are abstract categories used to order the phenomenological experience of the self, so it can be talked about in a systemic fashion. its the Ti you're so fond of, but you're not quite comprehending that labels don't solve the issue of causation. if anything causation is an intuition, one that even underlies science, which is why people are so fond of saying science is faith based ultimately, because is likewise grounded in certain intuitions

all you've really laid out is the case you don't understand socionics which is why your arguments always fail, because you only ever argue strawmen

[Singu]

depression being caused by Fi is only interchangeable with goblins in your head because its wrong, which is why no one says depression is caused by Fi. but even if they did they probably mean something like "depression inasmuch as it is the ethical suspicion that nothing matters is experienced under the domain we label Fi as a form of introverted ethical judgement." in other words, depressive thoughts are Fi thoughts inasmuch as they're introverted ethical judgements. Fi doesn't "cause" anything because functions are abstract categories used to order the phenomenological experience of the self, so it can be talked about in a systemic fashion.

You are missing the point.

The point is that things like "Fi" and "magical goblins" are grossly leaky generalizations, that can be made to mean pretty much anything it wants. They are, even as labels, ad-hoc solutions to many problems.

Let's say that we hypothesize about what is making a person feel depressed. So we make a hypothesis based on probabilities. We say that the person could be feeling depressed, due to following probabilistic examples: A) The person is questioning the futility of his existence, B) The person is overworked and feeling physically and mentally exhausted, C) It has something to do with his genetics or upbringing, or D) It's because of "Fi" or "Functions" or "magic goblins". Obviously the D) hypothesis can be discarded, because they are so far-fetched or too broad and vague to be probabilistically meaningful. It's not even testable.

But you say, "But that's not what I meant! By Fi, obviously I meant that it is the subjective moral questioning of the futility of existence." (And hence this proves that Fi is indeed causing it to show the symptoms of a depression (or not)).

Which comes back to the whole starting point. Fi can be said to mean anything it wants, and hence the pointlessness of its entire exercise.

[Bertrand]

all words are leaky generalizations on some level

[Myst]

@Singu @Myst are there any big forums for Cognitive Science?

I think I didn't see this one earlier. No, I don't know of any big ones.

So basically, I asked for actual objectively testable and repeatable experiments from those that argue psychology is science, you say I'm being "personal", whatever that means, post nothing that falls under that, and then defer me to google or wikipedia, which also offers none of what I ask.

Well done? What do you want a participation trophy?

Holy geez Batman, it's like people just want to argue for the sake of arguing.

The personal part was where you responded to Singu's reasonable post with a "Says who, you?".

(The thing in it about "crazy Jung shit", I may disagree with the presentation of that, but other than that, definitely a reasonable post. It's even open to the idea that Socionics can have some practical application, if proven enough.)

I told you to look on Google Scholar or introductory courses to psychology. You can also look at research articles from online versions of psychology research journals. There are many such.

How does google or wikipedia not explain how the "less soft" branches of psychology do use the scientific methodology and that there are experiments that are actually repeatable? Please show the parts where you fail to comprehend easily found online articles on this. I can try and explain in more detail to you if you find the referred sources inadequate for that.

PS: Holy geez, do people just want to try and read motivations into lines?

stuff like socionics, mbti, enneagram is more ti/ni and cognitive scientific psychology is more te. how socionics is better? they offer a framework within which u can work. cognitive psychology is all 1s and 0s, doesnt really hold any meaning.

No, if we must really categorize by Socionics definitions, cognitive psychology is very Ti. It works by explanatory models. It has way more frameworks than Socionics. I can't even begin to imagine where you got the notion that cognitive psychology is just 0s and 1s without any logical meaning.

Why can't every other animal except for humans follow the latest advancements in experimental science? Watch how quickly you appeal to brain functions to make the obvious argument

How else would you answer this other than saying, it's because other animals don't have the intelligence for it.

Psychology is never empirical. Even if you could do brain scans on people and see everything that's going on, you need someone's subjective report to know that they're depressed in the first place, and you need that subjective report to be able to know how to correlate brain states to it. The brain reflects everything in the physical world. To completely understand it, we'd have to understand everything in the physical world and then there'd have to be no new things. But there are always new things just as a matter of course. People won't understand my argument because it's basically the same fundamental argument as ultrafinitism but it's true. Abstractions are not real. Abstract means "to take away." But you have to take away from something. If you take away everything, there's nothing left.

You don't need the subjective report actually. You can measure things about emotional reactions empirically. It's not proven that it's necessary to understand everything in the physical world to understand the brain, but for sure the brain is a complex subject and isn't going to get boring anytime soon .

How is "your depression is caused by brain chemicals" any better? Never mind that it's not. If people feel angsty, that has to do with their lives. If they feel lethargic, that's a sign of illness, although that might be caused by something to do with their lives itself. Correlation is not causation, and correlation is all science can ever find. Science is instrumental. It doesn't give you a worldview. The worldviews of scientists are not proven by their work.

Feeling lethargic doesn't have to be a sign of physical illness. You also have to go educate yourself a bit more on how science works but Singu already explained it's not about just finding correlations. In fact, if you claim science can't find causal explanations, then you are claiming nothing can find them. (Not saying only science can find such, but if science can't then yeah, I don't know what kind of impossible standards you have to call something a causal explanation but they won't be met by anything or anyone else's attempts either.)

wut

if they're truly equally valid it just means the choice is illusory and the explanations are isomorphic. its like using two different words for the same thing. which is precisely how Ti gets confused, because they frequently make distinctions without differences. if they're not equally valid then it presupposes a standard by which to judge between them, that standard is usefulness. science is true inasmuch as it is useful, something is not useful inasmuch as it is scientific. get your logic straight

fuck

They aren't equally valid in reality, you simply don't know without having more information, so you can't pick one theory just because you like that one or whatever.

depression being caused by Fi is only interchangeable with goblins in your head because its wrong, which is why no one says depression is caused by Fi. but even if they did they probably mean something like "depression inasmuch as it is the ethical suspicion that nothing matters is experienced under the domain we label Fi as a form of introverted ethical judgement." in other words, depressive thoughts are Fi thoughts inasmuch as they're introverted ethical judgements. Fi doesn't "cause" anything because functions are abstract categories used to order the phenomenological experience of the self, so it can be talked about in a systemic fashion. its the Ti you're so fond of, but you're not quite comprehending that labels don't solve the issue of causation. if anything causation is an intuition, one that even underlies science, which is why people are so fond of saying science is faith based ultimately, because is likewise grounded in certain intuitions

all you've really laid out is the case you don't understand socionics which is why your arguments always fail, because you only ever argue strawmen

Causation != an intuition

Also yeah a lot of people reason like this on the socionics forums, like Singu presented it "(depression is caused by Fi").

all words are leaky generalizations on some level

Devil's in the details, here in the "on some level" part specifically.

psychology is such a broad word, but I think its fair to say it originated in history not the natural sciences and its precursors.

Source for this claim? I've never heard of this and it makes no sense, either.

neuroscience is sort of a new thing and encapsulates the most hard scientific aspects of the domain. the reason i say it originated in history because its always been about understanding human action, not necessarily about neurons or brains or whatever else.

It's not simply about understanding human action.

that came later when they realized certain behaviors were physical and not properly psychological. later still there is this movement to redefine all behavior as being causally rooted in physical processes only, which is a leap too far as far as I'm concerned.. it answer the question of human action by rendering it meaningless, in other words, it says "understanding" human action as originally conceived of by ancient historians and psychologists was itself confused. in other words, dramatic narratives are properly speaking nonsense, only scientific narratives are real causes of human action. which is something even if it were true I would not believe, because it subsumes ethics which is actually a more fundamental precursor to happiness than brain states. its why heroin addiction is bad

Your stance on ethics is interesting. How do you see ethics a "more more fundamental precursor to happiness" than brain states? I think I can imagine what you mean by this tho'.

another way to put the issue is if we want to solve the problem of understanding human action and eliminating suffering is we could just kill all people, which is no shit a movement rooted in much the same thinking taken to its logical conclusion

Lol, whatever solving the problem of "understanding human action and eliminating suffering" means, it's supposed to be a solution applying for living people.

[hatchback176]

Right, you have to notice functional differences before you even think to investigate the substrate for it. It's not obvious why an Elephant with greater brain mass than a human doesn't have the inherent capacity for state-of-the-art scientific reasoning. Reductionists have never found a singular unit or metric to rest their hat on anyways, the only thing that has ever mattered is intelligibility for communication. People that can't see a pattern that other people are coherently using to communicate with one another, like Socionics, "don't have the intelligence for it".

[Singu]

Well anyway, we more or less already know from neuroscience that "Why is there thinking, where is there feeling, why this or that, how does it all work", without having to reference Socionics by saying that "Because Fi! Because of type!" etc.

The "wall" between the "mental" and the "physical" plane has already fallen. This is from the book, The Blank Slate by Steven Pinkers, which explains how it all happened:

The Last Wall to Fall

THE FIRST BRIDGE between biology and culture is the science of mind, cognitive science. The concept of mind has been perplexing for as long as people have reflected on their thoughts and feelings. The very idea has spawned paradoxes, superstitions, and bizarre theories in every period and culture. One can almost sympathize with the behaviorists and social constructionists of the first half of the twentieth century, who looked on minds as enigmas or conceptual traps that were best avoided in favor of overt behavior or the traits of a culture.

But beginning in the 1950s with the cognitive revolution, all that changed. It is now possible to make sense of mental processes and even to study them in the lab.

Here are five ideas from the cognitive revolution that have revamped how we think and talk about minds.


The first idea: The mental world can be grounded in the physical world by the concepts of information, computation, and feedback. A great divide between mind and matter has always seemed natural because behavior appears to have a different kind of trigger than other physical events. Ordinary events have causes, it seems, but human behavior has reasons. I once participated in a BBC television debate on whether “science can explain human behavior.” Arguing against the resolution was a philosopher who asked how we might explain why someone was put in jail. Say it was for inciting racial hatred. The intention, the hatred, and even the prison, she said, cannot be described in the language of physics. There is simply no way to define “hatred” or “jail” in terms of the movements of particles. Explanations of behavior are like narratives, she argued, couched in the intentions of actors—a plane completely separate from natural science. Or take a simpler example. How might we explain why Rex just walked over to the phone? We would not say that phone-shaped stimuli caused Rex’s limbs to swing in certain arcs. Rather, we might say that he wanted to speak to his friend Cecile and knew that Cecile was home. No explanation has as much predictive power as that one. If Rex was no longer on speaking terms with Cecile, or if he remembered that Cecile was out bowling that night, his body would not have risen off the couch.


For millennia the gap between physical events, on the one hand, and meaning, content, ideas, reasons, and intentions, on the other, seemed to cleave the universe in two. How can something as ethereal as “inciting hatred” or “wanting to speak to Cecile” actually cause matter to move in space? But the cognitive revolution unified the world of ideas with the world of matter using a powerful new theory: that mental life can be explained in terms of information, computation, and feedback. Beliefs and memories are collections of information—like facts in a database, but residing in patterns of activity and structure in the brain. Thinking and planning are systematic transformations of these patterns, like the operation of a computer program. Wanting and trying are feedback loops, like the principle behind a thermostat: they receive information about the discrepancy between a goal and the current state of the world, and then they execute operations that tend to reduce the difference. The mind is connected to the world by the sense organs, which transduce physical energy into data structures in the brain, and by motor programs, by which the brain controls the muscles.


This general idea may be called the computational theory of mind. It is not the same as the “computer metaphor” of the mind, the suggestion that the mind literally works like a human-made database, computer program, or thermostat. It says only that we can explain minds and human-made information processors using some of the same principles. It is just like other cases in which the natural world and human engineering overlap. A physiologist might invoke the same laws of optics to explain how the eye works and how a camera works without implying that the eye is like a camera in every detail.

[Myst]

Right, you have to notice functional differences before you even think to investigate the substrate for it. It's not obvious why an Elephant with greater brain mass than a human doesn't have the inherent capacity for state-of-the-art scientific reasoning. Reductionists have never found a singular unit or metric to rest their hat on anyways, the only thing that has ever mattered is intelligibility for communication. People that can't see a pattern that other people are coherently using to communicate with one another, like Socionics, "don't have the intelligence for it".

Reductionism isn't about finding one singular unit or metric. Intelligence is based in brain functioning but that's a far more complex topic than measuring brain mass heh.

[Tigerfadder]

[hatchback176]

I don't know what that adds to my paragraph but thank you anyways.

[Singu]

That's a good introduction to System 1 and System 2 thinking...

[Myst]

I don't know what that adds to my paragraph but thank you anyways.

Idk what your original point was, would anyone really say it depends on brain mass alone, or...?

[hatchback176]

"Why can't every other animal except for humans follow the latest advancements in experimental science? Watch how quickly you appeal to brain functions to make the obvious argument" Just read what I write already

[Tigerfadder]

I wonder if we can make the parallell between system 1 and system 2 thinking and stresstypes. http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin...stance-Gulenko

[Singu]

Well see the problem is... These System 1 and System 2 thinkings already have their explanations... from an evolutionary-biology perspective, to how these types of thinking work neurologically, to computational model of the mind. So if there are parallels between them, and since the System 1 and System 2 already has an explanation, while the Gulenko's theory pretty much has no explanation, this one will the better theory out of the two.

[Tigerfadder]

Well see the problem is... These System 1 and System 2 thinkings already have their explanations... from an evolutionary-biology perspective, to how these types of thinking work neurologically, to computational model of the mind. So if there are parallels between them, and since the System 1 and System 2 already has an explanation, while the Gulenko's theory pretty much has no explanation, this one will the better theory out of the two.

Not everything is explained with evolution, especially quantum biology. That said there is a lot left to discover so do not just discard Socionics yet. It have good foundations actually. But it totally craps on evolution theories. Like how is there a split between male and female, around 50/50 naturally. Same with types.

[The Idiot]

This can also hinder typing. Even being typed from others perspective because the person seeking a type could provide specific or false information that could lead the typer to type the person a certain type that they wanted to be typed as and many other ways.

[Singu]

@Singu @Myst are there any big forums for Cognitive Science?

Not a forum, but this site seems to be a goldmine for very interesting psychology articles and journals:

frontiers in Psychology

Such as this article:

Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases

(20) Objective personality test. Many authors refer to paper-and-pencil personality instruments that employ a standard (e.g., True–False) item response format, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2), as “objective tests” (Proyer and Häusler, 2007), ostensibly to contrast them with more “subjective” measures, such as unstructured interviews or projective techniques (e.g., the Rorschach Inkblot Test). Nevertheless, although the former measures can be scored objectively, that is, with little or no error (but see Allard and Faust, 2000, for evidence of non-trivial error rates in the hand-scoring of the MMPI and other purported “objective” personality tests), they often require considerable subjective judgment on the part of respondents. For example, an item such as “I have many headaches” can be interpreted in numerous ways arising from ambiguity in the meanings of “many” and “headache’ (Meehl, 1945). So-called “objective” personality tests are also often subjective with respect to interpretation (Rogers, 2003). For example, even different computerized MMPI-2 interpretive programs display only moderate levels of inter-rater agreement regarding proposed diagnoses (Pant et al., 2014). Not surprisingly, clinicians routinely disagree in their interpretations of profiles on the MMPI-2 and other “objective” tests (Garb, 1998). We therefore recommend that these measures be called “structured” tests (Kaplan and Saccuzzo, 2012), a term that refers only to their response format and that carries no implication that they are interpreted objectively by either examinee or examiner.

(42) Personality type. Although typologies have a lengthy history in personality psychology harkening back to the writings of the Roman physician Galen and later, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, the assertion that personality traits fall into distinct categories (e.g., introvert vs. extravert) has received minimal scientific support. Taxometric studies consistently suggest that normal-range personality traits, such as extraversion and impulsivity, are underpinned by dimensions rather than taxa, that is, categories in nature (Haslam et al., 2012). With the possible exception of schizotypal personality disorder (but see Ahmed et al., 2013), the same conclusion holds for personality disorders (Haslam et al., 2012). Hence, if authors elect to use the phrase “personality type,” they should qualify it by noting thatthe evidence for a genuine typology (i.e., a qualitative difference from normality) is in almost all cases negligible within the personality domain.

(43) Prevalence of trait X. Authors in the psychological and psychiatric literatures frequently refer to “the prevalence” or “base rate” of attributes that are dimensionally distributed in the population, such as personality traits and intelligence. For example, one author team referred to the “greater prevalence of extraversion in American students” (p. 1153) compared with Korean students (Song and Kwon, 2012). Nevertheless, such terms as “prevalence,” “incidence,” “base rate,” “false positive,” and “false negative” are premised on a taxonic model: they presume that the phenomena in question are inherently categorical, that is, either present or absent in nature. For psychological features that are continuously distributed, such terms should be avoided. In the aforementioned phrase, referring to “higher levels of extraversion in American students” would have been more accurate.

[Singu]

From that Haslam et al., 2012 research in bold:

Categories versus dimensions in personality and psychopathology: a quantitative review of taxometric research

Taxometric research methods were developed by Paul Meehl and colleagues to distinguish between categorical and dimensional models of latent variables. We have conducted a comprehensive review of published taxometric research that included 177 articles, 311 distinct findings and a combined sample of 533 377 participants. Multilevel logistic regression analyses have examined the methodological and substantive variables associated with taxonic (categorical) findings. Although 38.9% of findings were taxonic, these findings were much less frequent in more recent and methodologically stronger studies, and in those reporting comparative fit indices based on simulated comparison data. When these and other possible confounds were statistically controlled, the true prevalence of taxonic findings was estimated at 14%. The domains of normal personality, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, externalizing disorders, and personality disorders (PDs) other than schizotypal yielded little persuasive evidence of taxa. Promising but still not definitive evidence of psychological taxa was confined to the domains of schizotypy, substance use disorders and autism. This review indicates that most latent variables of interest to psychiatrists and personality and clinical psychologists are dimensional, and that many influential taxonic findings of early taxometric research are likely to be spurious.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journ...A361F00E34B09#

--

It seems to suggest that personality traits are more dimensional than categorical. So more like Big 5 than Socionics or MBTI.