MBTI heuristic: how to judge whether someone is a thinker or a feeler

[Carl-Richard]

I think a good heuristic for diagnosing someone as a "thinker" vs a "feeler" is how often they say "because". Because it indicates the use of logical thinking. "I think this because this is connected to this, and this is this, therefore this is this. Why? Because this is this. And because this is this, this is this." etc.

If you are a feeler, you are more likely to just say a sentence and then let it stand on its own. It doesn't need further elaboration, because it's just what you feel. It didn't come from a deep systematic process of going from one thing to the next. Maybe you could derive the process after the fact (and perhaps that would indicate or give more evidence that it would be a more consistent or "true" feeling), but the process you arrived there was through feeling.

In that sense, feeling need not be devoid of "logic", but it's devoid of conscious use of logic (logic as a declarative process). It's in a way a shortcut to a logical process (or it can be), but you have less ability to be aware of it and perhaps test if it's sound. You can of course be feeling in an inconsistent way and that would be what people usually look down on feelers for, but it may not necessarily be the case; it could depend on how accurate and attuned your feeling is.

And the way feeling works is it's semantic rather than syntactic. You judge primarily by its pure holistic quality, not by relationship to other qualities. But ironically, a feeling can therefore contain syntax because you can feel the whole as a quality. If something is coherent, if there is consistency between the parts, you can feel it. That's how you can judge whether something is coherent with your values or not (without stating your values declaratively). You can simply feel whether there is coherence.

Perhaps there is also a feeling element to whether one logical conclusion follows from the premises declaratively. But then, the distinction between a feeler and a thinker is how often or how many connections you feel (and again, declaratively).

Edited 8 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Eskilon]

@Carl-Richard Interesting, because it made me think and feel

Do you think Buddha was an intuitive feeler or thinker? 🤔

Edited 2 hours ago by Eskilon