Reply To: Ren's video on Cognitive Typology

[Ren]

Hi Auburn,

I am fascinated by this idea of a "meta-description of all of humanity". I didn't realise the project behind CT was that ambitious.

There are passages in Psychological Types where Jung sounds almost 'cognitively deterministic', in the sense that he seems to say our points of view are bound to be determined by our cognitive functional alignments. He even goes so far as to suggest that widespread disagreements between theorists/theories might boil down not to who's right and who's wrong, but to people talking past each other because they operate within different, incommensurable ontologies, with different conceptions of what constitutes validity, etc.

So an interesting question to ask you would be something like this: how can you succeed in developing a meta-description that is not, in the last analysis, a reflection of a TiNe ontology? It sounds as if CT aims at a final elaboration where the cognitive functional alignment of the theorist (i.e. yourself) is neutralised or bracketed. In the early twentieth century, Edmund Husserl tried to do that with epistemology, and is widely considered in hindsight to have failed. So I am curious to hear what your stance on the matter is -- whether you think it's a pseudo-problem or something to be taken seriously.

Obviously, a lot of science doesn't seem to get overly worried about this issue. But perhaps it can get away with not being too worried because it deals with objects, not subjects. CT, however, is aimed at the subject, so the question of the theorist's own subjectivity becomes relevant. It seems to me there is an interesting methodological challenge rearing its head here, namely: how to provide a meta-description of all humanity from a neutral stance, in a language that is not always already 'contaminated' by the local ontological stance of the scientist.

Looking forward to any thoughts you may have : ) I have other thoughts regarding the bridging of physical and psychic but I might share them after you've responded to the above.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by Ren.