Welcome to the Lenore Thomson exegesis wiki.
The Main Propositions
Not Personality
Our Difficulties
Terms With Nonobvious Meanings
The Function Attitudes
Game-Board Exegesis
Negotiation Exegesis
Saints-and-Politicians Exegesis
Place-Your-Stakes Exegesis
Gear-Shifting Exegesis
Philosophical Exegesis
Orienting
Semiotic Attitude
Semiotic Attitudes
Semiotically Disoriented
Genus Problem
Tea Leaves And Tarot Cards
Tertiary Temptation
Developing the Secondary
Rhetorical Clash
Inferior Function
Type From Scratch
What Can INPs possibly teach ENPs about time management?
I Can Always...
Eric Berne
Jo Coudert
Louis Farrakhan
Fargo
Daria Morgendorfer
Larry Groznic
Jim Anchower
Jean Teasdale
This wiki is for understanding Lenore Thomson's ideas about psychological type, mostly as described in her book Personality Type: An Owner's Manual, and partly as she's talked about them on various Internet discussion lists.
By exegesis, we do not simply mean "What did Lenore mean?" but rather "What is she talking about?" We don't aim to nail down precisely what is or was in Lenore's head. Rather, we aim to see for ourselves some of the same things that she is seeing and describing. Naturally, each person will see such things in his or her own way.
The purpose of this wiki is not to settle on any definite interpretation of Lenore's writing, but to learn whatever we happen to learn by trying to articulate Lenore's ideas in our own words and through our own observations, and by watching other people's attempts to do the same. It's inspired by Lance Fletcher's concept of Slow Reading.
In accord with wiki tradition, when people propose opposing ideas, the wiki renders no verdict. Rather than attempting to have the wiki's text be an official statement of the settled truth of a matter, we encourage you to post all the competing ideas as clearly and persuasively as possible.
Even if an interpretation turns out to be clearly wrong, we still want it on this wiki. This wiki is a record of people's thoughts as they try to make sense of Lenore's writing: the surprising insights, the dead ends, the great ideas, the dumb ideas, everything. Nothing on this wiki is an official statement of what Lenore Thomson meant by anything she ever said.
While we eagerly welcome nearly any contribution of any Lenore-related ideas, we're not interested in judgements of Lenore's ideas, whether positive or negative. You're invited to explore and articulate the ideas, and leave judgement to the reader.
This wiki is hosted by Ben Kovitz.
A wiki is a web site that lets you edit its pages. It's sort of like an on-line bulletin board. To experiment, see Sand Box.
The first wiki ever was Ward Cunningham's Wiki. It was where many of the ideas of Extreme Programming were hashed out, as well as many software development patterns. Ward's Wiki still thrives as a meeting place for the software world to discuss culture, techniques, and ideas of all sorts.
Wikis, like Extreme Programming, involve a special style of collaboration: unilateral cooperation. Each collaborator edits without asking permission from the other authors. There is little or no planning or discussion: you just edit the text itself. This results in an anonymously, collectively written work that is never "complete" but just keeps on growing and improving.
You are invited to modify any text on the wiki you like, to make it clearer, more interesting, more stimulating. It doesn't matter who the "original" author of the text is. You are invited to improve it however you like. That might be as simple as fixing a typo or as involved as splitting text into several pages or rewriting it from scratch. The one proviso is to please never "improve" some text by having it no longer express an idea that you believe is mistaken. The wiki expresses all ideas that anyone found interesting or persuasive--rightly or wrongly. The improvements are to express the ideas so they are more stimulating to readers, and to add more ideas, never to take away.
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