Topic > A Treatise on Personality Theory - 594

Personality, its constructs, and its origins have baffled neuroscientists for the last century. Personality is of great concern to the scientific community and has still defied their attempts to deconstruct its mechanisms, refusing to give in to empiricism (Lewis, 2009). Personality falls within the scope of consciousness; it is by definition observable, but measuring personality is difficult except for its most rudimentary characteristics. In fact, much of what we know or think we know comes from inferential data. When studying personality there are two ideological camps; the nomothetic approach – the belief that personality is immutable, the result of environmental and genetic coalescence, a manifestation of determinism (Mullins, 2011) – the idiographic approach which favors individualism and ratifies (to some extent) the free will. I tend to side with the idiographic approach, the notion of neurological fluency is not only edifying but scientifically valid. Of course, free will cannot exist without possibility. In quantum physics the uncertainty principle requires the a...