...it doesn’t really tell you that, say, “Openness” is a valid physical construct in people’s brains...
I think this all depends on what your model predicts and with what accuracy. To use an analogy, a thing like “temperature” doesn’t really exist—it’s just an illusion caused by the motion of particles—but it’s still a very useful concept. In most cases, we can close our eyes and pretend that “temperature” is a measurement that really does refer to some physical quantity out in the real world.
So, is “Openness” (or any other of the Big Five axes) like “Temperature” ? Can we even measure a person’s “Openness” value reliably ? If so, what does it tell us ? What verifiable predictions can we make based on it ?
In the case of Myers-Briggs, AFAIK, the answers are “no”, “nothing much”, and “none”. In the case of temperature, we can definitely answer “yes” to the first question, and list a whole bunch of things like melting points and specific heat values etc. in response to the other two.
I think this all depends on what your model predicts and with what accuracy. To use an analogy, a thing like “temperature” doesn’t really exist—it’s just an illusion caused by the motion of particles—but it’s still a very useful concept. In most cases, we can close our eyes and pretend that “temperature” is a measurement that really does refer to some physical quantity out in the real world.
So, is “Openness” (or any other of the Big Five axes) like “Temperature” ? Can we even measure a person’s “Openness” value reliably ? If so, what does it tell us ? What verifiable predictions can we make based on it ?
In the case of Myers-Briggs, AFAIK, the answers are “no”, “nothing much”, and “none”. In the case of temperature, we can definitely answer “yes” to the first question, and list a whole bunch of things like melting points and specific heat values etc. in response to the other two.
Well yes, but the average kinetic energy does exist. So it just turns out that temperature didn’t quite mean what we thought it means.