マイヤーズが書いたTi(内向論理)

Thinking is essentially impersonal. Its goal is objective truth, independent of the personality and wishes of the thinker or anyone else. A seventeen-year-old introverted thinker, speculating on the method and purpose of the Creation, summed it up, “I don’t care what the truth turns out to be—but I want it to hang together.

Introverted thinkers use their thinking to analyze the world, not to run it. Relying on thinking makes them logical, impersonal, objectively critical, not likely to be convinced by anything except reasoning. As === PDFPAGE 116 === Descriptions of the Sixteen Types 89 introverts, they focus their thinking on the principles underlying things rather than on the things themselves. Because it is hard to switch their thinking from ideas to details of daily living, they lead their outer lives mainly with their preferred perceptive process, which makes them detachedly curious and quite adaptable—until one of their ruling principles is violated, at which point they stop adapting.

They formulate principles and create theories; they value facts only as evidence or as examples for a theory, never for their own sake.〔中略〕A psychology professor of this type explained to an extraverted student, “This paper is perfectly correct, but you have put so much more stress on the facts than on the principle that it is obvious that you consider the facts the most important part. Therefore, your mark is a “B.” The student was far more indignant over the reason than over the grade. “But of course the facts are the most important part,” she said.

Choice of the auxiliary process also affects the use that will be made of the dominant process, because the kind of perception employed determines in large part what elements of the outer world will be brought to the attention of the ruling thinking. If sensing makes the selection, the material presented will be more tangible and concrete, often involving mechanics or statistics but in any case factual. If intuition does the choosing, the material will be more theoretical and abstract, giving scope for the exercise of insight and originality.