The Lenore Thomson Exegesis Wiki
Here's an attempt to describe Lenore's ideas about J-vs.-P attitudes in terms of the way a person understands what it means for a statement to be true and how language refers to things.
The left-brain (J) attitudes view the world as overwhelmingly complicated, and language a means to navigating through it. Language enables you to navigate by directing your attention to only one or a very small number of things at once, and making one discrete decision at a time, always on the basis of clearly articulated criteria.
From the standpoint of Extraverted Judgement, truth is strictly a matter of management. Statements and rules lead people to make decisions that lead to certain kinds of results, and that's the end of it. Language exists as a shared medium for people to propose agreements and indicate where they stand in relation to proposals made by others.
| • | From the Extraverted Thinking standpoint, a statement is something that draws an empirically verifiable distinction, and truth is the empirically verifiable claim that if you do something that falls within distinction A, then things will proceed to a state that ends up within distinction B. To be empirically verifiable--that is, to serve as a tool of agreement and management--statements must be defined independently of the things they are about. There must be a simple, empirical test to determine whether the claim was true: the test must be defined before it is carried out, and it must produce a result that falls into one distinction or another, which is plain for all to see. Language and statements are things that we create and define in order to direct matters within desired "attractor basins": as long as the state of affairs falls into the desired basin, that is all that matters, and we need feign no hypotheses about how or why it happens. |
| • | From the Extraverted Feeling standpoint, a statement is something that defines a relationship of friendliness or hostility. From the Fe standpoint, there is no such thing as a neutral statement: everything is a declaration of where you stand in regard to particular people. Truth is somewhat irrelevant from this point of view; what matters is the relationship that your statements and behavior create. As long as people's relationship needs get met, then nothing could possibly be wrong with a statement. Language is the shared medium that provides the kinds of relationships that people can define and the forms in which they can express those relationships. Language is ultimately the form in which relationships exist--and relationships are the principal form in which we ourselves exist as human beings. Every statement in some way defines both you and the person you say it to. |
From the standpoint of Introverted Perception, truth and language reflect a choice: a choice of what you consider worth focusing on, or where your values, concerns, and cognitive capabilities lie.
| • | From the Introverted Sensation standpoint, a statement is true iff the state of affairs it refers to is as the statement says. "The table is brown" is true iff the table is, in fact, brown. It's as simple as that. A statement has a definite, clear-cut meaning, and it's either true or it's not. There are an infinity of things about which to make statements, and each one is fairly independent of the others. Language is something that we must define in order to focus our attention on things that matter. There are many, many things lying about, waiting to be named and described in factual language. |
| • | From the Introverted Intuition standpoint, a true statement would be one that included everything: it would be applicable in all possible contexts. As a practical matter, no such statement is ever possible. The reality is always more than can be said. "The table is brown" might be "true" in some narrow sense, but it omits the texture of the table, the actual variation in the woodgrain of the table that might well include reds and blues, the atomic structure of the table, the interior of the table, the underside of the table, and so on. What is interesting about a statement is not whether it's true, but what it says about the person who framed it and what it assumes about its context. How have the framer's goals, culture, prior beliefs, cognitive limitations, etc. affected the framing of the proposition at hand? Under what conditions might the assumptions about the context where one would interpret signs and make decisions in the way suggested by the proposition be false, leading to surprising results--at least for one who is unaware of those limits of applicability? |
The right-brain (P) attitudes address the complexity of real-world phenomena by capturing a "gestalt" in the totality of what is perceived. Instead of focusing on a few things and making one discrete decision at a time, they guide you to take in everything at once and respond continuously to the whole. Your situation changes, you change, the situation changes--not in discrete steps, but in a continuous flow. Instead of focusing on one or a few elements out of context as the basis for a series of decisions, every element in your experience simultaneously influences your ongoing response.
Thus right-brain attitudes lead to a "contextual" or "context-entangled" understanding of truth, where the meaning of a statement is defined by the real-world context in which the statement is made. Language is not something that you define prior to a given experience. Language is simply a refined way of pointing at things. To understand a statement is to look and see what the person who made the statement is trying to point out. The basic way to communicate is simply to point: to direct a person's attention so that the reality itself will then work on the person's mind and provide the ultimate definition of your meaning.
From the standpoint of Extraverted Perception, truth and what statements refer to are capable of constant change as circumstances change or as more becomes revealed to you. A meaning is always temporary, or ad hoc, to be revised continuously, never a steady guide to interpretation. The fact that something was meant yesterday is of no consequence today, if circumstances have changed. To put that another way, a statement made in the past is never a reason to do anything less than exploit present circumstances fully. It was just how things seemed yesterday.
| • | From the standpoint of Extraverted Sensation, present circumstances always dictate an immediate response which does not require thought, cannot be predicted in advance, and is not necessarily related to circumstances at any other moment. What there is to talk about is always immediately apparent, and all meaningful statements are just ways of pointing out what is immediately apparent. A statement is true iff it says what's right there, otherwise it's not true, end of story. Language is itself just more stuff to observe and react to. Language is less a medium for making true statements than a medium for grabbing attention and producing an immediate, visceral effect. What a statement means is not intrinsic to the statement: rather, it's the reaction that it really produces in real people in this culture right now. |
| • | From the standpoint of Extraverted Intuition, when you frame a statement, you are relating it to some part of its real-world context. You will understand the same thing in a different way by relating it to some other part of its context. Every time you relate a thing or a statement to more of the real-world context in which it arose, you understand it differently. Thus there is no one right way to frame a statement, and indeed no one right interpretation of a statement. Virtually any statement can be "true" if interpreted in relation to some appropriate aspect of its context. Statements do not mean anything except in relation to their real-world context--which is always changing, and always mostly unknown. A statement or term defined with perfect stability, so that expanding its context couldn't change its meaning, would be meaningless because it wouldn't relate to anything. |
From the standpoint of Introverted Judgement, language is a way of describing or pointing out a "gestalt" found in the world--some persistent, "essential" aspect of things that might take a different form in each moment but nevertheless remains the same and has continuity from moment to moment. Truth is having your mind attuned to reality--attuned to some "essence" that gives things unity and continuity. The rebellion of Introverted Judgement against any external definition of reality is summed up in the words of Jiddu Krishnamurti: "No organization can lead a man to truth. It is a hindrance, it can only impede. It blocks a man from sincere study. The truth comes from within, by seeing for yourself."
| • | From the standpoint of Introverted Thinking, statements attempt to capture or point out the way in which a multiplicity of different things or possibilities grow out of an underlying cause. A statement is true if it describes that underlying cause or source, and its relationship to what springs out of it, in a way that enables you to apply that understanding in new and different circumstances. The new circumstances may be quite unpredictable, but if you are attuned to the underlying causal factor and how it manifests itself, you'll be able to follow it in spite of the presence of other factors. A statement is false if it conflates multiple factors or conflates essence (source) with accident or property (result). Statements about the same subject matter can be deeper and deeper, as they describe more and more fundamental causal factors or overall patterns. |
| • | From the standpoint of Introverted Feeling, language is a way of expressing or pointing out the life force within things as it manifests itself in each moment. Language is always in some way an expression of emotion: the way in which the totality of your perceptions brings about joy or suffering by virtue of how it harmonizes or clashes with your nature as a living being. A statement is true if it reveals the life force of an organism at a certain moment. As with Ti, statements can be deeper and deeper as they reach more and more essential aspects of a living thing. The more you are in tune with the life force in things, the more you can perceive and respond to it in each moment, and the more you can see how everything that ever happens is in some way part of the same life force even as circumstances change unpredictably. |