Abstract
We argue that creative ideas are potentially valuable improbable constructions. We arrive at this formulation of creativity after considering several problems that arise for the theories that suggest that creativity is novelty, originality, or usefulness. Our theory avoids these problems. But since we also derive our theory of creativity from the scientific commitments of a more general theory of cognitive development, a theory called rational constructivism, our theory is unique insofar as it explains creativity in both adults and children through reference to a set of computational mechanisms that have been posited on the basis of independently plausible experimental research.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Here, we follow Bouwmeester, who distinguishes between two types of instrumental rationality: generative and expressive. Cognitive processes are generative if they produce more accurate representation; expressive if they find a way to use these representations for some independently valuable end (Bouwmeester 2017, p. 36).
The alternative uses task was discussed by Guilford in a connection with his factor analysis of human intelligence — see, e.g., “Utility Test (flexibility)” in (Guilford and Hoepfner 1966), extending his earlier theoretical work (Guilford 1950). Since then it has been widely adopted by psychologists as either the “alternative uses task”, the “alternative uses test”, or generic “tests of divergent thinking”. Unfortunately we cannot find a review of historical study of this experimental lineage.
The claim we are making here is easily confused with Alison Gopnik’s analysis of play and exploration in early childhood (Gopnik 2020). We all agree that there is a process of refinement that characterizes most people’s learning over developmental time. Gopnik offers a computational analysis of this refinement, as do we. But she does not share our efforts to extend this computational analysis into an epistemology of creativity, by linking the specific cognitive mechanisms (see below) that we posit in order to explain creativity with an explanation of the normativity of creativity (again, see below).
Briegel and colleagues have developed a theory of creativity that is similar in its intended scope and computational tractability — see (Briegel 2012; Briegel & De las Cuevas, 2012; Hangl et al. 2017). Briegel et al. also found themselves positing a strong concept of agency in order to explain creativity, which is one of the ways our theory is deeply similar to their earlier work
Frank Barron (Barron 1963) reports a positive association between creativity and a preference for complexity. If this is right, our theory should appeal to our most creative readers.
James does not mention creativity, and he uses the word “creative” only once across both volumes of his Principles. In speaking of the phenomenology of coming to a decision made on the basis of deliberation, James writes “... we feel, in deciding, as if we ourselves by our own wilful act inclined the beam; in the former case by adding our living effort to the weight of the logical reason which, taken alone, seems powerless to make the act discharge; in the latter by a kind of creative contribution of something instead of a reason which does a reason’s work.” (James 1918b, p. 534)
This principle places an important constraint on computational theories of psychological mechanisms: computational theories must account in computational terms for all of the observed behaviour of a given mental process of faculty, and not just claim that a computational theory has explained the relevant phenomena when only some (indeed, quite possibly a very small fraction of) the relevant phenomena can be described as approximating certain algorithms. In practical terms, this likely means that algorithmic explanations need to be supplemented by different kinds of causal explanations.
We believe that it is likely that a confusion between variability and normativity is endemic in contemporary cognitive science, and that this explains why epistemology and cognitive psychology have not converged, as Quine predicted, over the last half-century (Antony 2018; Quine 1969). To a good first approximation, psychologists, being experimentalists, are interested in studying non-overlapping distributions – and so are inherently interested in variations. Philosophers, by contrast, are interested in only a very small range of the total possible variability in the operation of any cognitive mechanism – the space in which the mechanism is operating rationally, or as close to ideally as possible. If this is right, then there is a sense in which psychologists and philosophers might be talking about the same cognitive mechanisms, but that impression largely misses the point. The philosophers are interested in phenomena that usually occur several (3? 10?) standard deviations rightward of a central tendency, while psychologists are interested in phenomena tightly clustered around the central tendency. If this is right, then there is little focal overlap between the two disciplines. However, since there is variability even when the mechanisms are performing optimally, there is no reason why there cannot be experimental work which studies variability of optimal (or rational) performance; likewise, there is no reason why there cannot be causal explanations of how it is that the mind produces its rationality. What may seem like a fundamental conceptual canyon could really be a by-product of a canalized history of choices about tasks and sample populations that is not favorable to studying the causal basis of optimal or rational cognition.
James on the moral wisdom of children: “Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.” (James 1918a, p. 127)
Many experimentalists distinguish between “novelty” and “originality” in something like the following way. Novelty is often measured by the novel uses test which takes something that has a known use (a hammer, a Kleenex) and asks people to put it to new (i.e. nonstandard) uses. Originality means “brand new” as far as that person is concerned, as per Boden’s concept of psychological creativity (see below). So novel uses are often original uses of non-original things. But sometimes what we want to talk about are original ideas (i.e. ideas that have not occurred before to that person). These are “original” ideas, not “novel” ideas in this schema, because being new ideas, they can’t be nonstandard applications of prior beliefs.
Since our project is one in Jamesian psychology not metaphysics, we are not concerned with novelty simpliciter but how novelty emerges in the mind and is categorized accurately by both children and adults.
We nevertheless think that the distinction between P-creativity and H-creativity is important: according to our theory of creativity, an expert is someone whose creativity is frequently H-creative. According to our view, the expert’s creativity isn’t creative because it has never been thought of before. But we still try to capture the underlying insight that inspires Boden’s distinction with our distinction between knowledge-seeking and expertise-dependent creativity.
Depending on the combinatorics of ideas, the relationship between NETSASE ideas and P-Creative ideas may be much more complicated. As one editor has noted, several very finely grained NETSASE ideas can be lumped together as a single P-Creative idea.
Philosophical discussion of the methods of cognitive science are, of course, idealizations. For a reality check, see (Bakker et al. 2012)
A clarification for the philosophers reading this paper: we are trying to develop a philosophically sophisticated scientific explanation of creativity. So, our theory illustrates one way of bringing together a computational theory of cognition with an explanation of creativity — this is hardly the only way of uniting the two. Philosophers will be able to imagine alternatives. The key question in evaluating these alternatives is whether or not they are entirely hypothetical, or plausible conditional upon at least some experimental data.
A reviewer offers the following counterexample that is helpful to consider as a way of clarifying our proposal: “Consider someone who practices mental arithmetic until they are at world-leading levels at it. The person has shrunk the gap to a minimum, but they are not in the least creative: they are outstandingly good at a rote activity. The competence / performance condition may be sufficient for some types of expertise, but it is not sufficient for creative expertise.” While we are grateful for the example, we do not think that this is a counterexample. The mathematician’s ability is not a case of creativity because the expression of world-leading arithmetical skill is not improbable because it is rote.
Here, our theory of creativity overlaps with “first-generate-then-evaluate” theories of creativity. However, we think that there are different kinds of creativity (there is knowledge-seeking and expertise-dependent creativity, at least), as well as a broader range of mental representation constructing processes.
RAND has placed the book online. In the foreword to the digital edition, they offer the following commentary to their readers: “A humorous sidelight: The New York Public Library originally indexed this book under the heading ‘Psychology.’”.
An important clarification: we do not mean that they know how to learn in a domain-general sense. Someone achieves cognitive agency with respect to playing the piano when they have spent enough time practicing piano (learning to learn to play the piano) that they sooner or later know how to keep learning. The process of learning searches from being exploration-like to being intentional and directed. Crucially, this does not mean that learning is thereafter path-dependent: the value of introducing intentionality here is that the learner can recognize that she has reached a local maximum, and can thereby switch strategies or areas of effort by making good (i.e. epistemically productive) choices.
References
A million random digits with 100,000 normal deviates. (1955). Rand Corporation.
Abraham, A. (2013). The promises and perils of the neuroscience of creativity. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00246/abstract.
Abraham, A. (2014). Is there an inverted-U relationship between creativity and psychopathology? Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 750.
Acar, S., Burnett, C., & Cabra, J. F. (2017). Ingredients of creativity: originality and more. Creativity Research Journal, 29(2), 133–144.
Albert, R. S., & Runco, M. A. (1999). A history of research on creativity. Handbook of Creativity, 2, 16–31.
Amabile, T. M. (1996). Creativity in context. Westview Press.
Antony, L. M. (2018). Quine as feminist: The radical import of naturalized epistemology. In A mind of one’s own (pp. 110–153). Routledge.
Bakker, M., van Dijk, A., & Wicherts, J. M. (2012). The rules of the game called psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 7(6), 543–554.
Barron, F. (1963). Creativity and psychological health. 292. https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/1964-06077-000.pdf
Boden, M. A. (2004). The creative mind: Myths and mechanisms (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Bouwmeester, O. (2017). The social construction of rationality: Policy debates and the power of good reasons. Taylor & Francis.
Briegel, H. J. (2012). On creative machines and the physical origins of freedom. Scientific Reports, 2, 522.
Briegel, H. J., & De las Cuevas, G. (2012). Projective simulation for artificial intelligence. Scientific Reports,2, 400.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. M.I.T. Press.
Chomsky, N. (2009). Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought. Cambridge University Press.
Denison, S., & Xu, F. (2019). Infant statisticians: the origins of reasoning under uncertainty. Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 14(4), 499–509.
Diedrich, J., Benedek, M., Jauk, E., & Neubauer, A. C. (2015). Are creative ideas novel and useful? Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 9(1), 35.
Fedyk, M., & Xu, F. (2018). The epistemology of rational constructivism. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 9(2), 343–362.
Fedyk, M., & Xu, F. (2019). The metaphysics of the development of the cognitive system: Why the brain cannot replace the mind. In S. Cullen & S.-J. Leslie (Eds.), Current controversies in philosophy of cognitive science. Routledge.
Feist, G. J. (2006). How development and personality influence scientific thought, interest, and achievement. Review of General Psychology: Journal of Division 1, of the American Psychological Association, 10(2), 163–182.
Fodor, J. A. (1990). A theory of content and other essays. MIT Press.
Gaut, B., & Kieran, M. (2018). Creativity and philosophy. Routledge.
Gendler, T. S. (2000). The puzzle of imaginative resistance. The Journal of Philosophy, 97(2), 55–81.
Gentner, D., & Hoyos, C. (2017). Analogy and abstraction. Topics in Cognitive Science, 9(3), 672–693.
Gopnik, A. (2020). Childhood as a solution to explore-exploit tensions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 375(1803), 20190502.
Gray, K., Anderson, S., Chen, E. E., Kelly, J. M., Christian, M. S., Patrick, J., Huang, L., Kenett, Y. N., & Lewis, K. (2019). “Forward flow”: a new measure to quantify free thought and predict creativity. The American Psychologist, 74(5), 539–554.
Griffiths, P. E., & Machery, E. (2008). Innateness, canalization, and “biologicizing the mind”. Philosophical Psychology, 21(3), 397–414.
Guilford, J. P. (1950). Creativity. In American Psychologist (Vol. 5, Issue 9, pp. 444–454). https://doi.org/10.1037/h0063487
Guilford, J. P., & Hoepfner, R. (1966). Structure-of-intellect factors and their tests. The Psychological Laboratory of the University of Southern California.
Hangl, S., Dunjko, V., Briegel, H. J., & Piater, J. (2017). Skill learning by autonomous robotic playing using active learning and creativity. In arXiv [cs.RO]. arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08560
Harre, R. (2002). Cognitive science: A philosophical introduction. SAGE.
James, W. (1918a). The principles of psychology: Authorized Ed., Unabridged (Reprint edition). Dover Publications.
James, W. (1918b). The principles of psychology: Authorized Ed., Unabridged (Revised ed. edition). Dover Publications.
Kaufman, J. C., & Baer, J. (2004). Hawking’s Haiku, Madonna’s Math: Why it is hard to be creative in every room of the house. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Creativity: From potential to realization, (Vol. 226, pp. 3–19). American Psychological Association, x.
Kushnir, T., Xu, F., & Wellman, H. M. (2010). Young children use statistical sampling to infer the preferences of other people. Psychological Science, 21(8), 1134–1140.
Lombrozo, T. (2012). Explanation and abductive inference. The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, 836, 260–276.
Lombrozo, T. (2020). “Learning by thinking” in science and in everyday life. In The Scientific Imagination. Oxford University Press.
MacKinnon, D. W. (1970). Creativity: A multi-faceted phenomenon. Creativity Research Journal, 19–32.
Mottweiler, C. M., & Taylor, M. (2014). Elaborated role play and creativity in preschool age children. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 8(3), 277–286
Quine, W. V. O. (1969). Epistemology naturalized. In W. V. O. Quine (Ed.), Ontological relativity and other essays. Columbia University Press.
Rescorla, M. (2013). Rationality as a constitutive ideal. In E. Lepore & K. Ludwig (Eds.), A companion to Donald Davidson (Vol. 578, pp. 472–488). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Runco, M. A. (1988). Creativity research: originality, utility, and integration. Creativity Research Journal, 1(1), 1–7.
Runco, M. A. (2004). Everyone has creative potential. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Creativity: From potential to realization, (Vol. 226, pp. 21–30). American Psychological Association, x.
Runco, M. A., & Charles, R. E. (1993). Judgments of originality and appropriateness as predictors of creativity. Personality and Individual Differences, 15(5), 537–546.
Runco, M. A., & Jaeger, G. J. (2012). The standard definition of creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 24(1), 92–96.
Runco, M. A., Illies, J. J., & Eisenman, R. (2005). Creativity, originality, and appropriateness: what do explicit instructions tell us about their relationships? The Journal of Creative Behavior, 39(2), 137–148.
Schulz, L. (2012). Finding new facts; thinking new thoughts. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 43, 269–294.
Simonton, D. K. (2008). Scientific talent, training, and performance: intellect, personality, and genetic endowment. Review of General Psychology: Journal of Division 1, of the American Psychological Association, 12(1), 28–46.
Simonton, D. K. (2013). What is a creative idea? Little-c versus Big-C creativity. Handbook of Research on Creativity, 2, 69–83.
Simonton, D. K. (2018). Defining creativity: don’t we also need to define what is not creative? The Journal of Creative Behavior, 52(1), 80–90.
Sternberg, R. J. (1988). A three-facet model of creativity. The Nature of Creativity, 125–147.
Stillings, N. A., Chase, C. H., Weisler, S. E., Feinstein, M. H., Garfield, J. L., & Rissland, E. L. (1995). Cognitive science: An introduction. MIT Press.
Szen-Ziemiańska, J., Lebuda, I., & Karwowski, M. (2017). Mix and match. In The Cambridge handbook of creativity across Domains (pp. 18–40). Cambridge University Press.
Tenenbaum, J. B., Kemp, C., Griffiths, T. L., & Goodman, N. D. (2011). How to grow a mind: statistics, structure, and abstraction. Science, 331(6022), 1279–1285.
Thagard, P. (2002). Curing cancer? Patrick Lee’s path to the reovirus treatment. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 16(1), 79–93.
Thagard, P. (2005). Mind: Introduction to cognitive science (Vol. 17). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Thagard, P. (2019). Creativity. In Brain-Mind (pp. 223–251). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190678715.003.0011.
Thagard, P., & Stewart, T. C. (2011). The AHA! Experience: creativity through emergent binding in neural networks. Cognitive Science, 35(1), 1–33.
Tiefer, L. (2006). The Viagra phenomenon. Sexualities, 9(3), 273–294.
Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind; a Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 59(236), 433–460.
Weisberg, R. W. (2015). On the usefulness of “value” in the definition of creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 27(2), 111–124.
Wiredu, J. E. (1970). KANT’S synthetic a priori in geometry and the rise of non-EUCLIDEAN geometries. Kant-Studien, 61(1-4), 5–27.
Xu, F. (2011). Rational constructivism, statistical inference, and core cognition. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(03), 151–152.
Xu, F. (2019). Towards a rational constructivist theory of cognitive development. Psychological Review, 126(6), 841–864.
Xu, F., & Kushnir, T. (2012). Rational constructivism in cognitive development (Vol. 43). Academic Press.
Xu, F., & Kushnir, T. (2013). Infants are rational constructivist learners. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(1), 28–32.
Xu, F., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2007). Sensitivity to sampling in Bayesian word learning. Developmental Science, 10(3), 288–297.
Acknowledgments
We wish to express our thanks to the excellent comments and criticisms we received from both anonymous reviewers and the editors. We are especially grateful to Dr. Killin for his deep and incisive editing.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
None to declare.
Ethical approval
n/a
Informed consent
n/a
Additional information
This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Creativity in Art, Science & Mind
Guest Editors: Creativity in Art, Science & Mind
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Fedyk, M., Xu, F. Creativity as potentially valuable improbable constructions. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 11, 27 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00343-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00343-4