MindFacets

A Recap of Concepts and Some Useful abbreviations

So far I have discussed two distinct types of ideas: objects (or instances), and relationships, and two distinct ways of organizing them: in webs and in maps. I hope the distinctions are obvious, since if you understand this, you already understand a great deal of styles of thought that make up personality.

Since these are important concepts that are used over and over, they have been assigned abbreviations:

W – Webbing

M – Mapping

S – inStancing

N – relatiNg

Also, since perceiving information is something the mind does, these activities are called cognitive processes, or just processes.

Side note on naming: N and S are the traditional abbreviations for the concepts that millions of people are already familiar with. I have thought of breaking with compatibility and using R for Relating, and O for ‘objecting’, (which isn’t really a good word, and I is already used for something else). Feel free to leave a comment to tell me what you think. I have thought about this a lot, delved through a thesaurus several times and there seems to be no obviously ideal answer.

The 4 combinations of Perceiving Processes

The mind does not just focus on webbing or mapping, or on instancing, or relating, but on some combination of both: webbing with a focus on instances, or mapping with a focus on the relations, for example.

There are four possible combinations, and they also have abbreviations. Here I also introduce the concept of an internal (i) or external (e) focus:

We – Webbing with a external focus – on the relations that reach out to connect to more ideas

Wi – Webbing with an internal focus – on the instance ideas, using the web to converge upon an answer

Me – Mapping with an external focus – on the mapped object as a whole, the meaning of a particular instance’s existence

Mi – Mapping with an internal focus – on the relationships charted within the object that give it its shape and characteristics

For this blog series, I will for the most part stick to the above abbreviations to keep things simple, but many others are possible. The alternate names I may use are Ne, Ni, Se, and Si, which are the traditional names known by many. These are just as valid, but I thought I would take the opportunity to place more of an emphasis on the M and W concepts, which have received very little attention, and may also be easier to understand. However, I will use the alternate name if I want to emphasize the N or S characteristic.

Another quick note is that the letter x is a fill in the blank letter to indicate something is unspecified. Wx refers to both We and Wi, for example, and Xe refers to both We and Me. The abbreviation for all four perceiving processes is Px, and will be useful later.

Here is a table of the four perceiving processes: