Stephen Downes

This is probably the best actual argument against learning styles I've seen, though the author does not address this issue in any way. Instead, Hollis Robbins is focused on the 'Big Five' personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. As Robbins explains, the taxonomy has its origin in Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert's 1936 Trait-names: A psycho-lexical study (176 page PDF) (interesting to me already because of my familiarity with Allport's The Individual and His Religion, which I studied in the 1980s). Through various processes of refinement these were reduced to the five, known as Norman's five. Long story short, Robbins considers various critiques, runs the Allport-Odbert list through Claude Fable, which concludes that "the compression didn't lose the relational, historical, addressed, and valuing vocabulary by accident at step forty; it discarded it at step one, as category error, and kept the words that predicate a lone individual in a vacuum." In other words, "character is built via a sequence of encounters in language, not an isolated trait item... calling correlations of self-descriptions a model of personality has always been a mistake."