Types of Minds

Abstract

The article presents typologies of minds which include logical and intuitive elements. The typologies of the following authors are presented: Henri Poincaré, Carl Gustav Jung, Stanisław M. Dobrowolski and Malcolm R. Westcott. In the proposals of the mentioned scholars, especially Westcott, the author of the article noticed and pointed out many positive aspects, but at the same time he showed the need to modify them. This mainly applies to the rooted tradition of treating intuition and logic as opposing and mutually exclusive processes, i.e. incompatible at the same time in the mind of a given person. From this theoretical stand, two pure types have been distinguished so far, as suggested by Poincaré, who distinguished logical and intuitive types. The other authors cited here proposed a greater number of types, usually four (Jung and Westcott), but they used more than one division criterion, hence next to logical and intuitive types were placed, for example, weak, guessing and other types. The author of this study proposed an integrative approach, where he distinguished five types of mind, namely: 1) extremely logical; 2) logical; 3) intermediate (balanced); 4) intuitive; 5) extremely intuitive. Here we can find a brief general description of these types, as well as examples of the minds of such historical figures as Socrates, Dmitri Mendeleev, Johann H. Pestalozzi, Ignaz Semmelweis, Adam Mickiewicz, as well as the fictional (literary) character – Sherlock Holmes.