Quote Originally Posted by Singu View Post
Well the problem is observing a certain trait in people, and extrapolating to all of their personalities. You can't know 100% of their personality traits, unless you observed 100%, which is practically impossible.

The fact is that people are logical some of the time, people are feeling some of the time, but definitely not all of the time. It depends on the appropriateness of the situation, etc. It's very doubtful that someone will be emotional when he's trying to solve some logical problems, and it's very doubtful that someone will be logical when he's listening to some music.
Actually emotions and rationality in the prefrontal lobe can work together (see Damasio's classic work on this subject).

Metacognition theories do introduce the idea of an "affective regulatory loop" that utilises *emotion* for executive functioning.

And so on.



Stereotypes of "ENTP" and "ISFJ" can exist. But it's doubtful that that's how they act all of the time. They may change their minds, they may change over time, they may learn new things that make them see things in different ways. The most important of all, it doesn't explain why they're behaving that way.

My personal view is that people don't differ in their ability to be logical and rational. But some people may have less feelings, or even are just less aware of their own feelings and the feelings of others.
What makes you think that people are all the same in terms of "cold objective" rationality and differ in terms of feelings? That to me didn't sound all that logical

I would say the easiest way to refute this idea is think of the stereotypical male vs stereotypical female. Yes those are stereotypes and how your brain works doesn't depend all that strictly on whether you have a penis or a vagina but there are actual differences in the brains of people regarding "masculine" and "feminine" stuff. Ofc it's an individual mix of different skills/traits for everyone.


Quote Originally Posted by Singu View Post
It's for the simple reason that if you can't explain "why", then you have no idea if it has anything to do with it or not.

Saying that there's a "type" is another way of saying that if someone is a certain way, then there's a very high probability that the person will be acting in the same way in the future. Which may be true.

But that's just an assumption that the person will be acting in the same or similar way in the future. It does in no way explain why he's acting in that way. It's just an attempt at predicting behavior and bypassing having to explain things. And a bad attempt at that, since true prediction isn't just expecting the same past trend to continue. Somebody may suddenly change his mind, and then what? The prediction then becomes impossible.

But you can explain why he changed his mind.
The socionics model does attempt to explain things, it's another issue altogether that the explanations are not holding up.

What @Heretic 007 said is an ok way to look at it. So no don't expect an actual explanation beyond what that can offer - though in my opinion even those explanations do not hold up well.