This is a brief series of notes on what I am going to briefly refer to as the formal systems of interpretation of people. Formal systems for short. Here I'm mostly going to look at those pseudo-scientific systems of people classification, taken as formal systems used to interpret human personality and behaviour, and refer to as examples the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (and C. G. Jung's earlier work in this matter), the Enneagram, astrology, socionics, and even the Big 5 personality system (while not a pseudo-science, and built on statistical data, can be treated alongside the other personality systems I have mentioned.)

But formal systems? By formal: There is a system of interrelation that is purely relational and devoid of content. To use Myers-Briggs as an example, what we find is that there is a series of axes, like Introversion/Extraversion, and as we get into "function theory", we see axes that relate individual "functions" like Introverted Thinking and Extraverted Intuition. This is quite properly a structure in the sense that we are given a set of elements (which can include these particular dimensions, or functions, or planets and constellations, and so on), which exist in particular relations to each other. It is quite possible to discuss these relations without necessarily appealing to the content of the particular elements, but rather the form of their interrelations.

In fact, we find that these elements gain their meaning from the differential relations that they have with each other. Introversion and extraversion gain meaning precisely from the fact that they are opposed, and to the extent that the I/E opposition differs from the N/S opposition. The meaning of a particular element only makes sense in the context of the other elements, with which it forms a particular totality.

Now that we've gotten the detour into structuralism, we can move on to what might be directly opposed to formal structures - hermeneutics. It's especially so since these systems are used to classify people, into twelve or sixteen categories or something. Taken as a project for classification these formal systems are obviously unable to capture the singularity of the human being, given how much diversity there is in people. How do we express the particular idiosyncratic forms-of-life in such a totalizing system? And one really can't. Something has to give way, and for those who are really eyeballs-deep in their obsession, we can see how it leads to all sorts of nonsense. Content to reduce the humanity of the people around you into your neat boxes, to fulfil your particular narcissism. To keep the rose-tinted goggles on. But it might be possible to think of a way to relate to such systems that do not fall into this particular trap.

The Hermeneutic Circle

Understanding is an ouroboros. The snake that eats its own tail. There is no place that you can start, no point of Cartesian doubt from which you can begin with a cogito ergo sum. It is this refreshing pragmatism, one could say, that makes the art of hermeneutics, and interpretation, so pressing to begin with.

When you read a text - a piece of religious scripture, a biological treatise, a philosophical dialogue or a text on law - there is no obvious beginning point. Each of us brings a particular set of attitudes toward a text, and a little understanding. The context helps us situate and understand the text, which leads us to revise our original understanding, our context, which influences how we read the text ... and it goes on ad infinitum.

The point of the hermeneutic circle is that there is no stable foundation, no stable starting point and that one is led to question their particular starting point, and to continually revise their understanding of the text. But this does not mean that "anything goes" or "the text means whatever you want it to be". While there's no firm foundation like the natural sciences (or at least in how the natural sciences are seen), we do find that there's a particular sense in which it is possible to have a particular fidelity to the text, to treat it with a particular engaged attitude. It is not for me to recount the problems and the philosophy of hermeneutics, but there are varied ways to keep this particular fidelity that isn't simply "know the state of mind of the writer of the text", as we see in such revisionist readings such as Derrida's (rebellious, deconstructive) fidelity in his reading of Austin's speech-act theory. I mention fidelity here, as I'll draw upon it later when I discuss ethics.

Given that hermeneutics is the study of meaning and interpretation, one could quite plausibly say that daily life, dealing with people, is a constant work of interpretation. We are all born hermeneuticians. Born interpreters. Our pre-theoretical, our pre-intellectual coping with the people around us, that begins with our parents. One could with various levels of profit bring in here the various psychological and psycho-analytic texts on childhood development, and I'll just mention that this, normally at any rate, becomes ready-to-hand, as Heidegger would put it.

Structure and Hermeneutics

But what about structure? Structure and hermeneutics might at first glance seem the most opposed. Structure: totalizing, foundational, almost anti-human, intolerant of diversity, almost. Hermeneutics as the opposite: anti-totalizing, anti-foundational, and humanist. Anti-structure. But we cannot forget that there is a hermeneutics of structure and a structure of hermeneutics. It is the former that I shall focus on, but the latter is certainly going to be characterised by contrast.

One cannot simply just apply a particular formal structure, the Enneagram for instance, just like that. That there are particular relations between the nine elements of the Enneagram that can be represented as a directed graph is just that. For these elements to have reference, sense, not just a meaning relative to each other, there has to be a way to relate the structure to lived experience. In fact, we have to say that the formal structure has to be interpreted first before it can be used to interpret others. After all, these systems are texts, objects of interpretation like all others.

In fact, I would consider it misleading to say that a structure is simply applied to experience directly, to our experience of others. What we have to think is the circle that the structure and everyday life finds themselves in. A hermeneutic circle with the text of the system and the behaviour of someone else. A constant back and forth. I use a notion from the system that is still vague for me - I suppose, ESTP from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, when I am faced with someone. Perhaps they tell me their type or I've made an educated guess. Most accounts would keep this relationship one-way, that I use MBTI to simply interpret the behaviour of my acquaintance. What such a reductive analysis misses is that this process also works in reverse, in that I use my acquaintance to interpret MBTI. "Is this Introverted Thinking? What about So-and-so, and how does that work with Introverted Sensing?" Partisans of scientific rationality claim that only science is self-correcting, but we find that self-correcting happens in all sorts of interpretive traditions, from theology to psycho-analysis to witchcraft (the last so well drawn out by Paul Feyerabend in Science in A Free Society.) MBTI is self-correcting - it does not work by falsification (though, of course, people can and do leave MBTI, the way that they can and do leave socionics, astrology, the Enneagram and other systems. To analyse leaving, we'd have to discuss other elements that web up the circle, which is quite beyond the scope of this essay.)

The interpretive mode appropriate here is why it is quite impossible to test this scientifically, any more than one could scientifically test ways of reading Shakespeare or interpreting the law. The distinction between the natural sciences and the human sciences. (Never forget that the pioneers of hermeneutics like Dilthey were interested in giving the human sciences their particular purport.) If MBTI is taken as a classificatory system, or notes toward one, like what the Big 5 system is supposed to be, a system of psychometrics, one will fall into all sorts of traps. The purpose is not taxonomy or psychometrics but rather to provide a frame of interpretation. And the frame itself is not static - it is necessarily dynamic. It is not exact like the definitions wanted in the exact sciences, but rather fuzzy and fluid. In that, the system in practice falls in between the two strands of structure and hermeneutics, concept and experience.

"What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves."

"What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves." An analysis of the Thinker and the Prover starts off Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising. What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. We are in the realm of magical thinking here. What the Thinker (the system) thinks, the Prover (experience) proves. The issue with magical thinking is not that it is inherently bad, but that it is so ignored and improperly understood that with few exceptions, most examples of serious attempts at magical thinking are confused, messed up.

Most people would affirm some variation of the above statement but in a negative sense. Confirmation bias. If you have a theory X, its easy to go out into the world looking for proof of X. Even in the natural sciences, we find that studies are biased by the beliefs of their authors. Is there no objectivity? Confirmation bias is, of course, an issue when science is concerned, when rational thinking is required. But it is how interpretive frameworks work, as I'd hazard a guess. Confirmation bias is an issue in science when it comes to linking fuzzy evidence with exact structures, fitting the inexact into the Procrustean bed of the exact.

But it is less of an issue when it comes to the systems that we have been discussing so far. The elements of these structures are open to interpretation, to fluid understanding. A Magical theory, as Ramsey Dukes would put it. "The test of a Magical theory is not whether it fits a hotch-potch of ‘objective facts’ thrown at you from hostile sources, but whether it fits your own experience." To expand on the anti-Popperian bent. "Try to see the truth in what I am saying rather than to test it for falsifiability — that is the correct approach to a Magical theory. While Scientists compete to disprove or reject ideas, Magicians compete to accept them. This approach worries rationalists who fear that such a gullible attitude must lead down a slippery slope into delusion. The Magical method is to act ‘as if’ a theory is correct until it has done its job, and only then to replace it with another theory. A theory only fails if it cannot take hold in the mind and allow one to act ‘as if’. As long as this approach is carried out properly — with a Magician’s understanding that the theory is being accepted only because it is ‘working’, not because it is ‘true’ — then there is little danger of delusion." [1] The danger of using a magical theory is when it is misapplied, taken out of its bounds, reified as a (pseudo)-scientific theory.

The Myers-Briggs definition of the various functions cannot be taken as psychological functions or entities - we must be careful not to reify them too much. Rather, they are these footholds of thought, these hinge points that we can hold onto in interpretation. Strictly speaking, Introverted Feeling or Extraverted Intuition are not existent in the other person but rather are effects in the dialogue between you and the other person. I talk to someone with Extraverted Sensing and notice that there is a particular sort of interaction between us. (I would say "discourse" but it is not purely linguistic, as it includes not just our words but our behaviour). As a user of MBTI, I would be interacting with him in such a way that I would be drawing out these functions, like Extraverted Sensing, out of him.

An "MBTI realist" might tell me that the functions exist inside him in some way, and would point out that it's not purely subjective, on my side. The person who is an ESTP will continue to behave like an ESTP outside of their interactions with me and will continue to live in an ESTP-ish fashion. (Of course, this has nothing to do with any particular psychological insight of MBTI - the lack of which I will treat later - and has more to do that behaviour is generally static.) The personality of the ESTP might be "constant", sure, and the ESTP is not going to spontaneously transform into an INTP, or an ENFJ, or an INFJ, according to the theories of these MBTI realists. This does not still mean that these functions exist out there in the subject themselves. When I talk to someone and decide that they use Extraverted Thinking, what I am doing is this act of interpretation that retroactively constructs them as a subject-in-an-interaction-with-me. Maybe they act like they have had Extraverted Thinking-ish traits their whole life - but the function of Extraverted Thinking is only created in my own faculty of interpretation, in my own act of interpreting their behaviour. Striclty speaking, "uses Extraverted Thinking" is not something that I can predicate of people, but only of my act of interpretation.

I want to dwell on this objection to the MBTI realist (or the "Enneagram realist", or the "Socionics realist") a little more. It's a tricky point, and I realise that in my attempt to be exact here, I might end up being impenetrable. These postulated entities do not exist in the subject itself - in a real sense, nobody really "is" an ESTP or an ISFJ or an INTP. I do not mean to say that there are zero patterns out there, but that these patterns are not "really in" the other person, but rather in the act of the interpretation. To the extent that Introverted Sensing or Extraverted Feelings are real, it is to the extent that are drawn out by this act of interpretation. "But that's nonsensical! Someone who is an INTP is an INTP even if you don't look at him, the pattern exists even if you didn't see it." Is it? I'm willing to grant that all sorts of behaviours are real and that there are patterns, but the baptism of such patterns as INFP or ESFJ is a movement that works retroactively, bringing together all sorts of patterns under a single umbrella. The interpretive act gives you a frame that allows you to draw out, make real, this or that function out of the subject.

For an example from the natural sciences. Bruno Latour: "You can very well claim that Ohm's law is universally applicable in principle; try in practice to demonstrate it without a voltmeter, a wattmeter and an ammeter." The mistake is to take Latour to be some sort of anti-realist of science, that he doesn't believe in Ohm's law. Quite the opposite - realism is indeed what Latour is infamous for. But while Ohm's law might have existed for all time (while the person might have been an Extraverted Feeling user all their life), the only existence of Ohm's law, the manifestation of Ohm's law is always in a particular set of equipment (the function Extraverted feeling is only in my interpretation of it), which retroactively decides the former term. So Ohm's law has been true all along... "So they were an Extraverted Feeling user all along..." It's the "so it's...", the "That's what it was!"

Barnum Statements and Systemic Equivalence

Sceptical treatments of divination, like the tarot and the I Ching and astrology take it to be nothing but a repository of Barnum statements. Never mind that serious, grounded books on the occult cheerfully admit the Barnum nature of their divinatory statements. [2] We have already discussed this earlier, in our discussion of magical thinking. Magical theories like MBTI and the Enneagram work by multiplying the various forms of fluid interpretation in the sort of everyday living and experience. They cut data at their joints - but not the data of the exact sciences, but the fluid data of subjective experience. In that, they are unfalsifiable in a strict scientific way, and can only be evaluated in a pragmatic fashion.

Which comes down to the comparison between systems. If the reason that systems work was intrinsic to them, we would expect that success and failure would come to a feature of the systems themselves. But the interpretation happens in the mind, and besides, no two people would interpret the same system in the same way. It would seem that the system that "works" for someone comes from their particular affinities. Some go to astrology, some to MBTI, some to ... The definition of the elements is vague and fluid enough to "fit" experience, and the formal rules, like the various axes in Myers and Briggs give combinatorial rules that allow you to assemble together an experiential image.

In fact, I would like to offer this particular assertion. Any formal system of a certain minimum complexity and fluidity is generally able to subjectively work as a way of interpreting people. Astrology, MBTI, Socionics and the Enneagram - all these are anti-psychologistic frameworks (as they are not drawing out the structure of individual minds, no) that allow you to capture human experience in a particular way. Each system has a series of elements that allows you to draw certain features of people, creates interpretations and has formal rules that characterise these elements with respect to each other, to give the system a sort of coherency, that allows you to combine elements together. Each system implies its own view of life, which are only slightly overlapping. The MBTI world, the astrological world, the ... All these systems are formally equivalent, and one is not better than the other on structural merits. Each has its own blind spots that can be used to shed light on each other's blind spots. There is no way that one can choose a particular system over another on its own merits.

As an example, let's see how the statement "You have Introverted Feeling" is constructed (not just discovered. Facts are always constructed.[2]) I talk to this particular subject, and the process what happens is that in a conjunction of both of us, and our shared environments, the function Introverted Feeling is created in this particular conjunction. The fact is that any other system would have sufficed, too. I could have decided that they had a Saturnine melancholic disposition. I am not dispassionately identifying patterns (which, given the Duhem-Quine thesis, is impossible even in natural science, anyway), but rather creating them in this particular hermeneutic space.

Fidelity and Ethics

When all is said and done, though, what is fidelity when it comes to interpretation? I mentioned fidelity in relation to Derrida's reading of Austin - Derrida shows fidelity to a particular strand, a particular notion or unity in Austin's work, even while he deconstructs Austin, to the scandalisation of John Searle. We can look at the manifold traditions in the interpretation of texts, especially of the law and of religious scripture, which is at the foundations of our symbolic world. (Friedrich Schleiermacher, instrumental in founding hermeneutics, was a biblical scholar.)

There is already the age-old question of how to relate to someone else. How do you relate to the Other as Other if you insist on reducing him to the Same? ie. How do you respect the fact that the other person is indeed another person, with their own subjectivity, if you insist on reducing them to a neat set of boxes, the familiar? To domesticate the other person, to pervert the formula of recognition "so it's ..." to "So that's what it always was..." - reduction to Capricorn or Type 7 or ISFJ. Perhaps it has to do with not reifying the system in the other person, to take interpretation as it is, interpretation. To keep interpretation open and fluid, open to revision, to keep the hermeneutic circle rotating, to know when to give up your system. To be able to recognise the unfamiliar without reducing it to the familiar. To have fidelity toward the other person, I suppose, is to have a careful fidelity to hermeneutics and the system.

[1] S . S . O . T . B . M . E . REVISED, AN ESSAY ON MAGIC, Ramsey Dukes

[2] outsmart, v. To embrace the conclusion of one's opponent's reductio ad absurdum argument. "They thought they had me, but I outsmarted them. I agreed that it was sometimes just to hang an innocent man." From The Philosophical Lexicon, Daniel Dennett and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen

[2] See Science in Action, Bruno Latour.