Quote Originally Posted by sbbds View Post
That’s all unrelated to it being valid or not.
Well I just said that it was all about making observations and categorizations. If you try to "prove" that types exist or something, then all you're proving is that what you have observed so far is correct. But it won't ever tell you anything about what you will be seeing in the future. Or anything that is yet to be observed, which must include a whole chunk of human personality and interactions.

I very much doubt that Socionics has much predictive ability. It's always about explaining things after the fact. It says "this happened, which is explained by...". But you can explain anything after the fact. The whole point is to try and predict what you think would happen, if X were true.

The whole reason why we conjecture and hypothesize things, is because it could be correct. But it could also be one of the millions of possibilities where it's false. So how do we know that an explanation is the correct one? Well one of the ways to do it is to try and predict what would happen, if X were true. That's exactly what we do when we perform tests and experiments.