As we covered in the article on Cognitive Functions, everyone uses all four cognitive functions (T, F, S, and N) in both Versions (introverted and extraverted), for a total of eight Function Attitudes (Ti, Te, Fi, Fe, etc.).

Since we all use all eight Function Attitudes, what determines the sixteen types that people belong to? That's where function position comes in.

Function position describes where a particular function attitude is 'located' in a person's mind. It's important to note that function position is not a literal map, but rather a model through which we can conceptualize types. There is no physical place in the brain that corresponds to the Dominant function, for instance. Instead, our diagrams of function position are simply a shorthand which allow us to describe how each type uses each function.

Because function positioning uses models and not maps, there are multiple models that typologists have created. Most of them describe the same thing, just visualized differently. It's like showing the same data with a bar graph vs. a pie chart - the information they contain is the same, but we can format it in different ways.

Because of this, it's very important to understand the model a typologist is using in order to understand the information they're trying to convey. For an overview of some of the most popular function models, check out this reddit post that we wrote. We aim to cover each more in depth in the future on this website.

The model we use in all discussion of theory on this site is an amalgamation of several pre-existing typological models. We are tentatively calling it the Constitutive Model, or ConModel for short. I hope you will find it relatively intuitive to grasp. Let's take a look.