Rational and Irrational
What does Lenore Thomson mean when she says rational and irrational?
Thinking and Feeling are both supposed to be "rational," while Sensing and Intuition are supposed to be "irrational". Presumably rationality vs. irrationality would give some clue about what introverted and extraverted forms of the same function attitude have in common. For example, both extraverted thinking and introverted thinking are both rational.
Presumably she is not using the terms in their everyday, loose meanings. For example, she probably isn't using "irrational" to mean "stupid" or "crazy" nor "rational" to mean "wise" or "intelligent".
Hypothesis #1: Lawfulness
Carl Jung defines these terms in Psychological Types, roughly, as follows. First, the genus of rationality and irrationality in their primary sense (as Jung thinks of them) is attributes of real-world phenomena. In other words, rationality and irrationality are not primarily attributes of mind or attitude, but attributes of things in the world. Rational things are those that behave lawfully. Their behavior is capable of being explained by a common principle. Irrational things are those that have to be taken as a given, without explanation or underlying principle.
For example, the way things fall under the influence of gravity is rational, because there is a law that explains it. The distribution of nickel ore in the Earth is not rational: it's scattered randomly over the Earth, the result of meteorite impacts that have come without pattern or guiding cause. (View Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science)
Secondarily, then, a rational attitude is one that orients by laws, and an irrational attitude is one that simply takes each new thing independently. A rational attitude tends to derive its conclusions by applying laws or principles to irrational data. Its conclusions are always indirect: mediated by principle in some way. An irrational attitude lacks a derived aspect: what seems to be true via an irrational attitude simply seems to be true, with no possibility for doubt or explanation.
Something that's not clear here is what about Feeling makes Jung call it a rational function. Lenore goes to great pains to explain that Feeling is rational, but it's not at all clear what her point is. You place people in different spots on your speed-dialing list according to how close you feel to them, and this makes Feeling rational? What we lack is an understanding of what Lenore means by "rational".
Possible explanation in that others, who know the Fe rules for placing people in a speed-dial, would recognize the varying importance of people given the criteria.
An example is Cathy and her mother's arguments about who should be #1 on Cathy's speed-dial. For Mom, she should be #1 because she is family (the closest relationship a person can have) & she will always be there for Cathy. For her, #1 on the speed-dial means #1 in Cathy's life. For Cathy, her boyfriends should be #1 because she always obsess about them while she's dating them, but they often change while Mom will always remain, so Mom should be #2 because nobody ever changes speed-dial #2. (This is not to say that Cathy is Fe, merely that she has a different system; Mom, on the other hand, is definitely ESFJ.) These systems are rational because they have constant, consistent, well-defined rules backed by valid Feeling rationalizations, and the person inevitably lives by them. Versus: rules which have arbitrary explanations; rules backed by logical reasons (such as the alphabetical - Te); complete arbitrariness where the person has no rules/categories & doesn't organize or define at all; etc. (r.g)
A pretty basic clash between T and F types is that T types expect some sort of proof to accept a conclusion while F types usually don't see any point in proof: "I think what I think because that's how I am. You think what you think because that's how you are."
Hypothesis #2: Continuity
Hypothesis: Thinking and Feeling emphasize continuity; Sensing and Intuition emphasize discontinuity.
From a T perspective, we view the world through the lens of causation: things are interconnected in certain ways, and to achieve goals or to have harmony among elements, we need to see to it that things are informed by one causal principle. We especially achieve order by adhering to a single principle throughout time. This is what gives a person integrity: from the Te perspective, being answerable to a stated principle or socially recognized authority; from the Ti perspective, being answerable to the self-sustaining causal harmony perceived in nature.
From an F perspective, we view the world through the lens of people as organic wholes: "who you are" is something that persists through time. From an Fe perspective, it behooves you to maintain consistent loyalties over time. Where your loyalties really are—conceived as an enduring "fundamental attribute—will be exposed through your actions. To put this another way, the persona that you create through social interaction with others is not something that you can change willy-nilly. It exists in the form of an unwritten social contract with other people; it would not be a contract if you could change it unilaterally. From an Fi perspective, people are organic wholes, and all questions of value are meaningful only in relation to each person's unique soul. You want what you want, and that's that. But these wants are not independent: they are part of an organic unity of soul. It behooves you only to create a more and more unified, organic unity of soul for yourself. This is integrity, seen from Fi.
From an S perspective, every fact is independent of every other fact. To know anything, you must observe it. What cannot be observed is neither here nor there. From the Se perspective, what exists today produces an instinctive reaction in you. That instinctive reaction is you. You might react completely differently tomorrow. You always interact with what is happening right now, not with the past or the future. The past is over and the future is beyond your control; it will take care of itself, or it won't. An Si perspective would seem to emphasize continuity, in that it leads people to value traditions and routines. But the reason for this is because it perceives the world as mostly unknowable and dangerous; consequently, you need to stay within the islands of the known. You need a map to find your way, or you won't know what to make of any fact you come across. A fact is only truly known when it's represented in some stable form. And each new fact is just that: new, and independent of other facts. It becomes relevant to you by virtue of the map that you carry in your mind.
From an N perspective, the appearance of continuity in things results only from the way you're looking at them; looking at them a different way would lead you to perceive a different continuity. N attitudes thus lead you to view things from a "meta" perspective: how would we understand things differently if we applied a different conceptual framework? What way of understanding things can we invent to show us through a given problem or situation? An Ne perspective leads you to ground your conceptual frameworks in the tangible world, seeing each one as an ad hoc hypothesis to be expanded or revised as you broaden the real-world context. Thus an Ne perspective leads you to open up parts of the world that haven't been explored yet, on the premise that they will change your present understanding of things in a way that you can't predict. An Ni perspective leads you to search for a way of seeing that is independent of any given way of interpreting things. From an Ni perspective, you look to the powers of the mind to create a way of seeing a priori, without worldly influence. Any real-world concern would taint your understanding, making it "relative" to that influence and thus not truly "objective". An Ni perspective aims for total neutrality between conflicting ideas, total independence from observation, total independence from any perceived form of continuity or lawfulness, and thus total self-sufficiency of mind (and thus solipsism in its most extreme forms).
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