The use of everyday personality language for scientific purposes

The major question of the article is whether the natural language of personality provides an adequate point of departure for the construction of a scientific system of personological categories. Five obstacles to this endeavour are: (1) the domain is dificult to delineate, both with respect to its categories and in the choosing of items within categories; (2) the extent to which terms can be translated from one language to another appears to be limited; (3) the overwhelming role of evaluative aspects is embarrassing from a scientific point of view; (4) instead of obeying simple and clear taxonomic principles, the domain appears to be unruly in this respect; and (5) many terms and expressions are paradoxical when used in the first person. Tentative and partial solutions to these problems are proposed.