Rhetorical Clash

Rhetorical clash is mismatch between the unwritten rules by which people persuade and communicate

What seems relevant and/or persuasive according to one person's way of making sense of things can seem irrelevant and/or illogical from another, and not just because they don't share a common vocabulary for talking about the subject matter. Rhetorical Clash is clash between the very rules by which people do rhetorical business.

On this page, we try understanding Lenore's function-attitudes as different "unwritten rules" of how signs relate to their referents.

For purposes of this page, a sign is anything understood as standing for something else. Words are signs, of course. But things we observe can also be signs. For example, a cumulus cloud appearing on the horizon is a sign of oncoming rain.

A referent or meaning is whatever the sign stands for. We'll see that depending on the attitude that you take toward signs, the word referent or the word meaning will make more sense.

Four axes

Reference-entanglement

If signs are reference-entangled, the meaning of a sign can only be grasped if first you've grasped its referents, via some kind of causal interaction. Signs do not have any meaning at all apart from this interaction. For example, to know what the word "cloud" means, you need to have seen some clouds. If you haven't seen clouds directly (e.g. if you're blind), then you learn the meaning indirectly, by by told about it in terms of things that you have experience directly (the causal chain from referent to meaning goes through other people).

Ti, Fi, Se, and Ne attitudes assume reference-entanglement. Te, Fe, Si, and Ni assume reference-disentanglement.

If signs are reference-disentangled, signs and their meanings are completely separate things. The notion of referents doesn't apply. Signs are like pixels on a screen that you examine without regard for the existence of a thing whose image is being shown on the screen. For example, a handshake is a sign telling you that two people are friendly. But you can understand friendliness without understanding handshakes, and you can understand handshakes without understanding friendliness.

Need-anchored vs. thing-anchored

If signs are need-anchored, then anything that does not reflect or relate to a need of a living thing is meaningless. The set of meanings is the set of ways in which something can matter to a living being.

If signs are thing-anchored, then in order to have meaning they must relate to things (if reference-entangled, then as referring to things or aspects of things; if reference-disentangled, then as guides to how to respond to different things).

Fe and Fi are need-anchored. Te and Ti are thing-anchored. The other attitudes are agnostic about this.

Relation-entanglement

If signs are relation-entangled, then their meaning depends on other things and the signs' relationships to them. The way in which a word's meaning can change when its context changes illustrates reference-entanglement. If the meaning of a cumulus cloud is relation-entangled, then you can't see it simply as a sign of oncoming rain. You've first have to understand how it relates to other things, like the ground, the wind, maybe even the solar system.

If signs are relation-disentangled, then they mean what they mean regardless of anything else. For example, if you see me pull out my knife, you know I'm gonna cut you, sucka. Usually when people speak of "facts" they mean propositions they can regard as established, regardless of whether some other proposition in question is true or false.

Ne and Ni are relation-entangled. Se and Si are relation-disentangled. The other attitudes are agnostic.

Temporally anchored vs. atemporally anchored

If signs are temporally anchored, then their meaning is understood as being "relative to" an actually existing state of the world: the way things are at a certain time, viz. right now. For example, the customary meaning of a handshake is meaningful only by virtue of our shared social vocabulary for expressing friendship.

If signs are atemporally anchored, then they retain their meanings regardless of change. The terms of a contract, for example, to be binding, must retain their meaning from the time the contract is signed to the time when you decide if the contract has been met and everyone gets paid (or not). If circumstances change in unexpected ways, the contract must retain its meaning.

The introverted attitudes are atemporally anchored: Si, Ni, Ti, Fi.

The extraverted attitudes are temporally anchored: Se, Ne, Te, Fe.

(There is something wrong here: from a Te standpoint, contracts must be defined using a "stable" conceptual framework. Archetypally anchored might fit better, but then we'd have to define archetype. Or maybe this is better: an attitude assumes atemporal anchoring if its vocabulary of meanings can change due to empirical observation. Perhaps the most obvious solution is: internally anchored vs. externally anchored.)

Attitude by attitude

Ni: Signs mean what they mean only by virtue of some way of assigning meaning to them (reference-disentangled). For any interpretation of a sign, in some other context it would mean something else (relation-entangled). The world of meanings exists independently of concrete reality; you can explore that world without regard to what signs supposedly mean and indeed without regard to anything that exists (atemporally anchored). Within what is expressible by any particular mode of sign-interpretation, you can't see or anticipate the contexts that would upset the expectations implicit within that mode of sign-interpretation. For example, within the surface level meanings of politeness, like where members of parliament address each other as "my honored colleague", you can't see the hostility that is actually guiding people to speak.

Si: Signs are not necessarily dependable: it might be safe to turn on a stove and it might not; there is no necessary connection (reference-disentangled). To be able to get along in the world, you need to be able to trust the signs you see. You need to be able to turn on the stove with confidence, without checking out every aspect of the stove. There is just too much to check. (Relation-disentangled.) These ways of interpreting signs must be stable under changing conditions or you wouldn't be able to depend on them (atemporally anchored).

Te: You interpret what you see by plugging it into a structure that tells you what response to make. The structure that you plug things into is like a big sorting machine: whatever you drop in gets sorted into one bucket or another (reference-disentangled). For example, if someone drove his car into an intersection while the light was red, that's a traffic violation; if while green, that's legal. The buckets must make no reference to the things being sorted into them or to the people doing the sorting or the purposes to which these buckets are put (thing-anchored, or at least not need-anchored): if they did, then the sorting machine wouldn't sort things into the same bucket every time. They would not provide a way to make fair, objective agreements that all can see are met or not met. Where do you draw the lines between the buckets? On the basis of what works right now (temporally anchored). If you find empirically that your current way of assigning responses to stimuli isn't working for you, then change it to something else.

Ti: We form our vocabulary of meanings by experiencing the full range of potential of what things can do (reference-entangled, thing-anchored). We "get" a concept when we see the mathematical principle at work: a relationship within the potentialities, an invariant that holds true in each way that a thing can be. The causal principle exists in the nature of the things themselves. The potentialities continue to exist, and always did exist, regardless of whether any given one is actualized right now (atemporally anchored).

Ne: A sign means the entire process that caused that sign to occur (reference-entangled, relation-entangled). A cumulus cloud, for example, "means" every aspect of the weather system that brought it about, including the rotation of the Earth, the shining of the Sun, every molecule in the atmosphere, and everything we don't know about yet--even things that we can't think to ask about. You can come up with an interpretation like "a cumulus cloud today means rain tomorrow" but it's only a guess. It vastly transcends what you've directly observed or can possibly observe. So, as the process continues, you need to continually revise your guesses to incorporate aspects of the process that have recently emerged and weren't visible before (temporally anchored).

...need more...

Rhetorical clash

The theory, then, is that people are capable of experiencing signs as meaningful according to those eight different sets of "unwritten rules".

What makes this observable is the ways in which people persuade. Typically people attempt to persuade others by connecting signs to meanings according to the rules that make sense to them (the persuader, not the persuadee). Type clash is just rhetorical clash: people are not attaching meanings to signs by the same rules, and find each other's rhetoric meaningless.

...need examples...

An example of introverted/extraverted clash is attitudes toward treaties. From an extraverted standpoint, a treaty is meaningless if either country no longer perceives it in its self-interest to abide by the treaty. From an introverted standpoint, when you sign a treaty, it is a matter of honor to stand by it. You don't violate a treaty unilaterally. That casts doubt on your integrity, your very ability to treat signs as meaningful.

The early-2003 clash over respecting U.N. resolutions is an introverted/extraverted clash. From an extraverted standpoint, since the U.N. has no power to enforce its resolutions, it's in danger of becoming "irrelevant". From an introverted standpoint, the U.N. provides a crucial check against countries acting unilaterally on the basis of what they momentarily understand as being in their interest.

Psychological types

Pyshcological types, on this theory, are not attitudes but ways in which people call upon different attitudes to establish self-identity.

Each person can and does make conscious sense of signs and meanings according to all eight attitudes, but at different times and for different purposes. The person's "type" mostly has to do with the relationships between those purposes.

Si and Ni in a tiny bit more detail (an email excerpt)

Both Pi attitudes look for ways to assign meaning to signs without regard to context.

Taking an Si attitude, you look for ways to ensure the integrity of signs and their meanings by taking some measure to stabilize them or finding stability in the world. For example, you declare a notational convention and insist that people adhere to it, you perform safety inspections to filter out causes that could undermine our normal expectations, etc. I imagine that the Alpha-Bravo-Charlie code was invented by someone taking an Si attitude: we are going to make damn sure that we can recognize and trust that the words we hear on noisy radio links stand for the letters that the speaker intended. Saying "alpha" instead of "A" protects the listener's interpretation from the unpredictable context of line noise.

Taking an Ni attitude, you look for a vocabulary of meanings that's independent of the signs and anything they're "supposed to" mean--all the other things that they might *really* mean, which might not even be expressible in terms of the vocabulary that makes sense within the system (or any possible vocabulary). "What is the unsayable truth?" Brain-in-a-vat thought experiments are sort of the extreme of this attitude. The book _Games People Play_ provides a more realistic illustration of taking this attitude: it explores hidden blame games and shameful motives that underlie behavior that, on its surface, appears innocent. Ni leads you to look for a vantage point on sign interpretation that is independent of any given interpretation: you explore conceptual possibility independently of concrete reality.

Both attitudes make you keenly aware of unpredictable, incommensurable, unknowable aspects of things. I think they also tend to lead you to fear them.

Both of these are left-brain attitudes; both see context-entanglement as dangerous and cognitively overwhelming: as something you need to relentlessly pare away--by, for example, designing your objects to be testable in isolation from the rest of the program. (referring here to unit-testing in Extreme Programming)

The function-attitudes are more than the four axes

The four axes described above do not imply all the traits of the function-attitudes. For example, upon hearing that Te is way of understanding the relation between signs and meanings where meaning is reference-disentangled, thing-anchored, and temporally anchored, you could not deduce the "buckets" concept of Te.

The hypothesis here is that the vocabulary of entangling and anchoring goes a long way toward understanding rhetorical clashes--both between and within people, especially as illustrated by Lenore's types. The strong hypothesis would be: where there's rhetorical clash, there's clash between opposite attitudes toward entanglement and/or anchoring.

But there's no implication that the function-attitudes are fully explained or described by the "clash axes".

What's the difference between entanglement and anchoring?

I don't know, it just sounded better to say "anchoring" for two of the kinds of clashes.

Perhaps entanglement has to do with meaning, and anchoring has to do with giving a damn or heuristic (what seems like worthwhile ways of poking around to find valuable stuff).

The extraverted rebuttal to introverted arguments is, "Who cares?"

The introverted rebuttal to extraverted arguments is, "But this does matter!"

"How many divisions does the Pope have?" --Joseph Stalin

How do the four "significant" attitudes look when characterized in terms of semiotic clashes?

Let's see...

INTJ: reference-disentangled (Ni) thing/need-agnostic relation-entangled atemporally anchored

reference-disentangled (Te) thing-anchored relation-agnostic temporally anchored

reference-entangled (Fi) need-anchored relation-agnostic atemporally anchored

reference-entangled (Se) thing/need-agnostic relation-disentangled temporally anchored

INFJ: reference-disentangled (Ni) thing/need-agnostic relation-entangled atemporally anchored

reference-disentangled (Fe) need-anchored relation-agnostic temporally anchored

reference-entangled (Ti) thing-anchored relation-agnostic atemporally anchored

reference-entangled (Se) thing/need-agnostic relation-disentangled temporally anchored

ENTP: reference-entangled (Ne) thing/need-agnostic relation-entangled temporally anchored

reference-entangled (Ti) thing-anchored relation-agnostic atemporally anchored

reference-disentangled (Fe) need-anchored relation-agnostic temporally anchored

reference-disentangled (Si) thing/need-agnostic relation-disentangled atemporally anchored

ESTJ: reference-disentangled (Te) thing-anchored relation-agnostic temporally anchored

reference-disentangled (Si) thing/need-agnostic relation-disentangled atemporally anchored

reference-entangled (Ne) thing/need-agnostic relation-entangled temporally anchored

reference-entangled (Fi) need-anchored relation-agnostic atemporally anchored

Preliminarily, it seems that:

When you go from dominant to inferior, you stay agnostic on whatever you're agnostic about, and reverse everything else.

When you go from dominant to tertiary, you hold temporal anchoring constant and reverse everything else.

When you go from dominant to secondary, you reverse temporal anchoring, hold reference-entanglement constant, and toggle agnosticism on the others.

Perhaps the basic Lenore proposition of "the secondary is a feasible way of getting unstuck" comes down to: to successfully switch temporal anchoring, you also have to give up your agnosticism or anchoring in some other way.

For example, for INTJs, this would mean that to deal consciously with temporal matters, you have to put away your thing/need agnosticism and anchor yourself to some things. "Pitch your tent of truth someplace, at least temporarily." In the process, they learn to take a relation-agnostic attitude, which others perceive as narrow-mindedness.

Random observations

Every attitude is semiotic-agnostic in some way.

The only thing Ni and Ti have in common is that they're atemporally anchored.

Same with Ne and Te.

If we combine attitudes by replacing agnostic with committed (sort of like Boolean OR), we get:

Ni/Te:

reference-disentangled thing-anchored relation-entangled temporally flexible

Ti/Ne:

reference-entangled thing-anchored relation-entangled temporally flexible

So it looks like the basis of INTJ/INTP rhetorical clashes is that they both seem to be playing by the same rules in that they're both taking a thing-oriented, relation-entangled attitude toward meaning, but they not playing by the same rules when it comes to the very peculiar axis of reference-entanglement.

There's more to it than that, though. They anchor temporally in incompatible ways. Hmm, the above is messy. Maybe it's time to invent more notation:

Reference: R Relation: L Need/Thing: F/T Temporal/Atemporal: E/I entangled: e disentangled: d anchored: a agnostic: g

Ecch.

Contractiveness

Another axis, maybe as important as the others, is whether the heuristic that naturally arises from an attitude leads your search to "contract" to one point.

The rational attitudes seem distinguished not by appeal to law (as in Jung) but by a tendency for all paths to lead to a certain destination. Their heuristic paths lead to an attractor. The irrational attitudes have no such tendency (with the possible exception of Si, which seems to lead people to stabilize anything that's already somewhat stable).

That might explain a great deal of type clash.

Ne is "heuristically expansive". Got a problem you can't solve? Make it more complicated! Throw in more stuff! See if something new emerges.

Ni is heuristically expansive in a different way. Got a problem you can solve? Hit the solution with things from outside the problem space. See if you can break the solution's assumptions.

S attitudes seem to neither expand nor contract. They just follow stuff wherever it goes. Si leads you to follow whatever is stable; Se leads you to follow whatever grabs your attention. "Go with the flow."

Contractiveness might be a better concept for the anchoring/agnosticism toggle of switching to the secondary. So the fundamental Lenore proposition would be, "To draw successfully on your temporally disfavored side, you need to hold off on contraction (if a rational type) or pick something to contract on (if an irrational type)."

More words to choose from

entangled anchored oriented directed following seeking

I avoided "context-entangled" because it seems to work equally well to mean reference-entangled or relation-entangled.

Perhaps, though, a better pair would be: context-entangled and context-relative. Context-relative would mean that you can change the meaning of the sign by changing the context (Intuition). Context-entangled would mean that the sign has no meaning apart from its context (Introverted Judgement).

All combinations

There are a lot more combinations of values of the four axes than Lenore-attitudes:

ref-entangled need-anchored rel-entangled temp-anchored attitude

ref need rel temp Ne/Fi ref need rel atemp Fi/Ne ref need non-rel temp Se/Fi ref need non-rel atemp Fi/Se ref need agnostic temp none ref need agnostic atemp Fi ref thing rel temp Ne/Ti ref thing rel atemp Ti/Ne ref thing non-rel temp Se/Ti ref thing non-rel atemp Ti/Se ref thing agnostic temp none ref thing agnostic atemp Ti ref agnostic rel temp Ne ref agnostic rel atemp none ref agnostic non-rel temp Se ref agnostic non-rel atemp none ref agnostic agnostic temp none ref agnostic agnostic atemp none non-ref need rel temp Fe/Ni non-ref need rel atemp Ni/Fe non-ref need non-rel temp Fe/Si non-ref need non-rel atemp Si/Fe non-ref need agnostic temp Fe non-ref need agnostic atemp none non-ref thing rel temp Te/Ni non-ref thing rel atemp Ni/Te non-ref thing non-rel temp Te/Si non-ref thing non-rel atemp Si/Te non-ref thing agnostic temp Te non-ref thing agnostic atemp none non-ref agnostic rel temp none non-ref agnostic rel atemp Ni non-ref agnostic non-rel temp none non-ref agnostic non-rel atemp Si non-ref agnostic agnostic temp none non-ref agnostic agnostic atemp none