Core Descriptions of the Cognitive Functions
Submitted by: jungneuropsychology
So, a lot of people have trouble with identifying the cognitive functions, mainly because on the internet most blogs will tell you what the functions DO, instead of what the functions ARE. So with this post I aim to destroy that confusion.
First of All: What is the outer world? And what is the inner world?
Yeah, yeah, we all have that: “The inner world is the world in your head and the outer world is the physical world”, but do you know what’s actually going on in your head? What this inner world consists of? No? Then, how can you tell what the inner world is?
The inner subjective world is the world that consists in all of your accumulated beliefs and values. Your mental map if you will.
Beliefs are everything that you consider as true or false. From “the bike is red” to “God created the universe”.
Values are everything that you consider as good or bad. From “telling a joke is a good thing” to “The subject of the joke is a bad thing”.
The outer objective world is the world that consists in all of the observable beliefs and values. The physical world if you will.
While it comes clear that the inner world is not limited to abstract or concrete, without being very difficult to understand how can one have subjective values, because values are literally subjective. The outer world is also not limited to abstract or concrete, there are objects, that we can tell for sure, in the same way there are memories of images and songs in your head, but there are also more or less hidden cause - effect principles in the outer world that our intuition regardless of it’s attitude catches. And objective values, are objective in a way that they consider important what most of other people consider important, or what they think most of other people consider important, those other people’s values might be subjective themselves but they are “objective” in their numbers, this is why they are called objective values.
Emotions =/= Feeling. I just want to make this clear, everybody has feelings, feelers don’t have more feelings than thinkers, the Feeling function works with values, not emotions, what is desirable, not what is instinctively pre-programmed in our brain due to our human nature. Sure, some of those values may come from feelings, but that’s a different story.
As a side note. Sensitivity has nothing to do with your MBTI type, the same as intelligence has nothing to do with your MBTI type. There are some times that are more sensitive or more intelligent than others on average, but that’s the final point where it extends, on average. There are S types with <170 IQ outsmarting dozens of N types.
But if you wonder, there is an objective (commonly agreed to measure) sensitivity test just like there’s an IQ test for intelligence. And the types with the highest scores on average were: INFP, INFJ, INTP and INTJ. Yes, you heard that right. Remember that these are only on average. Hypersensitivity doesn’t mean that others don’t suffer, it only means that you take it harder than other people.
You might want to keep these “inner world” and “outer world” definitions separated from the definitions of the cognitive functions they are working with.
Cognitive Functions or Functions-Attitudes, as C.G.Jung called them, are the basic functions of: Sensing, Intuition, Thinking and Feeling, whose dominance manifestations we can see in one’s natural behavior and preferences on the test, combined with the attitudes of either introversion and extroversion. But what does that mean?
Well, the core definitions of introversion and extroversion are as follows:
Introversion => Focus and trust on the inner world.
Extroversion => Focus and trust on the outer world.
For this reason an introvert is never limited only to the inner world but only focused on the inner world. The opposite is true for extroverts. And the same is true for the cognitive functions, but how?
Sensing => All perceptions by means of the sense organs.
Intuition => Perception by way of the unconscious, or perception of unconscious events.
Thinking => Interpretation of information based on whether it is correct or incorrect.
Feeling => interpretation of information based on whether it is good or bad.
To answer the question “but how ?”: By combining the functions with the attitudes. In forms of focus and trust of the respective attitude. So:
Introverted Sensing => Perceptions by means of the sense organs with focus and trust on the inner world.
Extroverted Sensing => All perceptions by means of the sense organs with focus and trust on the outer world.
Introverted Intuition => Perception by way of the unconscious, or perception of unconscious events.
Extroverted Intuition => Perception by way of the unconscious, or perception of unconscious events with focus and trust on the outer world.
Introverted Thinking => Interpretation of information based on whether it is correct or incorrect with focus and trust on the inner world.
Extroverted Thinking => Interpretation of information based on whether it is correct or incorrect with focus and trust on the outer world.
Introverted Feeling => Interpretation of information based on whether it is good or bad with focus and trust on the inner world.
Extroverted Feeling => Interpretation of information based on whether it is good or bad with focus and trust on the outer world.
Both attitudes do perceive and judge both the inner world and the outer world, they are NOT limited to one world as it is usually assumed. The difference stands in the world they trust when making their judgment and the world they focus on.
How does that work? For example: You have ideas that either came from the inner world of whatever garbage you have on that map or the outer world of whatever you noticed in reality. On which of them do you focus more?
Here’s a little warning for fellow Introverted Intuitives: All ideas could be wrong or right, but unlike Extroverted Intuition who looks at America and France and says “America is like France in this way because of that” you might look at a drop of water and realize how the universe is this and that”, so you need to be especially careful with your intuition. Don’t bring down your morale, there’s always assumed information, but apply your judging function to your own perception.
Now that you have that idea, or someone gave you an idea and you understood that idea, is that idea correct or incorrect? How do you find out? Do you trust more the outer world and see whether that happens in reality or the inner world and see whether that makes sense in your head? One would look at the facts while the other would look at the theory and this is where we make transition between what the functions ARE and what the functions DO.
Those were the core definitions. What that means is that the introverted functions subconsciously ask the question: “How does that relate to my map?”, therefore having the well-known tendency to deep and narrow. They look at their inner map in terms of whatever that function does.
Ni does so with perception by way of the unconscious, or perception of unconscious events; and Si does so with perceptions by means of the sense organs. And so on. That inner world is ironically changed by the new beliefs and values that come from the outer world, or to be more precise, the interaction with the outer world.
The extroverted functions work directly with what is there and the introverted functions work directly with what is perceived from there. The extroverted functions work with both what is in the inner and the other world but trust the outer world more, and the introverted work with both the inner and the outer world (concerning their domain) but trust more the inner world. There’s a big difference between only working with one world and working with both but trusting one over the other.
While extroverted functions don’t ask that question, they see how that relates to reality, and look at what is there in reality (by this I mean in the objective outer world, not necessarily truth, because your, and all of us’ perceptions of the outer world are not complete) and trust the reality in terms of whatever their function is, over their inner map. Therefore having the well-known tendency for wide and shallow.
That doesn’t mean that when an Si user is going to be hit by a car, he’s not going to move because he remembers he’s been hit by a car once and survived, but because he also has in that map of his Ne understood ideas that if I survived once that doesn’t make it a pattern, and that if you get hit by a car you’re very likely to die which his parents told him when he was little. After he got what his parents said, he went to Ti or Te to find out if that would really happen, and because of his personal judging system, either he saw people dying that way, he saw it on the news, or he took his parent’s word for it, we don’t know; he believes that’s true. And either Fi or Fe says death is bad.
By this, it should become quite clear that you can’t have both Si and Se. You can’t trust both your inner world and the outer world on your perceptions made by the sense organs, one of them has to be trusted more, one of them has to be focused more on. Fi users will trust subjective values while Fe users will trust objective values, one cannot do both for sometimes they are conflicting.
You can’t focus on both of them at the same time, just like handedness. While there are ambidextrous people when it comes to handedness this doesn’t happen in MBTI’s cognitive functions.
I hope this helped. I tried to be very specific in my choice of words, due to the completely abstract nature of the subject at hand you can’t explain it with non-specific words, 50 people would simply interpret it in 50 different ways.
Whether the cognitive functions are real or not I cannot tell. They are not physical things to be seen so it all comes down to a theory. As far as I’ve heard, there are some scientific evidence for them but I haven’t looked into that so this is only what I’ve heard. Remember that MBTI is something made to explain, not something being explained.
