Abstract
In the past few decades, creativity has become rather like money: everyone seems to want more of it. And just as we are living in monetarily inflationary times, so too the notion of creativity has undergone a wholesale devaluation. Soon we shall not only be carting away our weekly salaries in wheelbarrows, but the very act of doing so shall come to be called a creative one. Yet however lax popular standards may become, there seems to me to be one aspect of creativity which will remain constant, and that is that creativity is something valuable, and that the notion of creativity is permeated with evaluation. To adjudge something to be “creative,” in other words, is to bestow upon it an honorific title, to claim that it deserves to be highly valued for one reason or another.1
Revised, and greatly expanded, version of a paper first presented at seminars in the Universities of Edinburgh and Leeds. I want to thank the participants in those seminars, and especially Stanley Eveling, Leon Pompa, and Geoffrey Cantor, for their critical comments and suggestions. In addition, I owe special thanks to Michael Krausz for a series of stimulating discussions of issues related to this paper.
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References
A similar point has been made by Vincent Tomas in his article “Creativity in Art,” reprinted in V. Tomas, ed., Creativity in the Arts (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 97–109.
From a letter, reprinted in P.E. Vemon, ed., Creativity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 55. Italics are in the original.
From a letter, reprinted in P.E. Vernon, ed., p. 57.
Quoted in R.S. Woodworth, Experimental Psychology (New York: Holt, 1938 ).
Quoted in Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949 ), p. 15.
In. H.A. Krebs and J.H. Shelly, eds., The Creative Process in Science and Medicine (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1975), p. 31. Morris also reports (on p. 58) that a journalist asked Picasso: “What do you think of chimpanzee painting?” and Picasso bit him!
I should point out here that, strictly speaking, C would lack novelty relative not to P alone, but only relative to P together with T. But on the assumption either that what T describes existed prior to C, or that T itself existed prior to C, if follows that, since C is deducible from P plus T, C is no novelty relative to what preceded it, to what existed prior to it.
See J. Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Knopf, 1971), especially Chapter 2.
In his “Indeterminism in Quantum Physics and in Classical Physics,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1 (1950), and elsewhere.
For Popper’s “3 World” theory, see his Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), especially Chapters 3,4, and 6.1 should say here that my approach in this paper has been greatly influenced by Popper’s “objectivist” epistemology.
From J.P. Sartre, Existentialism tr. Bernard Frechtman ( New York: The Philosophical Library, 1947 ).
A propos of this, Popper writes: “At any moment we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories; our expectations; our past experiences; our language. But we are prisoners in a Pickwickian sense: if we try, we can break out of our framework at any time” (“Normal Science and its Dangers,” in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970], p. 56). Popper does, I think, tend to underemphasize the difficulty of such “breakouts.” In fact, I believe that were such “break-outs” easy to achieve, we would no longer see them as creative.
J.P. Guilford, “Traits of Creativity,” reprinted in P.E. Vernon, ed., pp. 167–88. The quotation is from page 167.
N.E. Golovin, “The Creative Person in Science,” in C.W. Taylor and F. Barron, eds., Scientific Creativity: Its Recognition and Development (New York: Wiley, 1963), pp. 7–23. (The quotation appears on page 8.) This volume consists of selected papers from three conferences on “The Identification of Creative Scientific Talent” held at the University of Utah in 1954, 1957, and 1959, and supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. This latter fact, together with the fact that Golovin himself served for a time on the White House staff, indicates both the degree of official U.S. support for the study of creativity and the extent to which American psychologists encouraged the belief in the great practical potentialities of their research.
T.A. Razik, “Psychometric Measurement of Creativity,” reprinted in P.E. Vernon, ed., pp. 155–66. The quotation, with italics in the original, is from p. 156.
What, one wonders, is the reasoning behind such optimism? An instructive analogy can, I believe, be drawn between many 20th Century students of creativity and 17th Century students of methodology. For 17th Century thinkers, like Bacon and Descartes, scientific progress was to be guaranteed by “the man of method” whose relentless application of the correct methodology would ensure continuous progress. But we now live in a post-Einsteinian age (in art, a post-Picasso age) and our idea of scientific (and artistic) progress is a more dramatic, revolutionary one. As a result, I conjecture, many 20th Century thinkers have come to see “the man of creative imagination” as the new guarantor of scientific progress. Hence the idea that creativity had to be something we could do something about; for otherwise scientific progress becomes a contingent accident, a matter of fortuitous happenstance. The lesson, I suspect, has yet to be learnt that there is no guarantee of scientific progress, and that the fact that we have any knowledge worthy of the name at all is itself a miraculously improbable occurrence.
The main methodological tool of such studies were the so-called “open- ended tests of creativity.” As Liam Hudson has pointed out in his book Contrary Imaginations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 126: “Open- ended tests are known throughout the United States as ‘creativity’ tests. Yet… there is scarcely a shred of factual support for this.” For the severe problems involved in validating such tests (that is, in showing that they are actually testing creativity!) see R.J. Shapiro’s contribution in P.E. Vernon, ed., pp. 257–69.
The notion of a “research program” is due largely to the writings of Popper, Agassi, and especially Lakatos. For a discussion of psychology’s dominant modern metaphysical research program — behaviorism — and some suggested reasons for its current demise, see my “Is a Kuhnian Analysis Applicable to Psychology?, “Science Studies 2 (1972): 87-97. For further reflections on behaviorism, see my “Skinnerism and Pseudo- Science,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 9 (1979): 81-103.
At this point, it will be useful to clear up two possible misunderstandings: First, I am not here assuming that a critical interaction with prior products is the only way in which creativity might be possible. My point, rather, is that if the creativity of a product resides in its relations to previous products, then the least mysterious way in which creativity might be possible is via an interaction of the creator with those prior products. Secondly, my point of view does not entail that whenever we adjudge a certain product X to be creative that we are ipso facto forced into judging the producer of X to be creative, or the process by which he created X to be a creative process. (Think of the monkey at his typewriter typing out Hamlet and you will see why we do not want to be so forced!) In other words, we may very well insist upon additional conditions which have to be met (additional, that is, to the production of a creative product) before we will call the producer, or his means of production, creative. In fact, I shall attempt to spell out some of these additional conditions in Sections 5 and 7. What my point of view does entail, however, is that we cannot call a person, or his processes, creative without reference to his products; not that we must call him, or his processes, creative given such reference.
Incidentally, a similar argument can be used to show that a purely “scientific” psychology or sociology of knowledge is equally impossible. For “knowledge,” like “creativity,” is a normative or evaluative notion which applies, in the first instance, to the outcomes or products of research and not to the psychological processes or sociological conditions involved in research. Thus, we cannot identify as facts per se any sociological conditions of knowledge. In other words, far from replacing epis- temology, there cannot even be a sociology or psychology of knowledge in the absence of epistemology. For in the absence of epistemology (or “the criteriological science of knowledge,” to adopt Collingwood’s terminology) there simply is no knowledge, and so clearly no psychology or sociology of it. Pace Quine, epistemology cannot be naturalized. For some rather disastrous consequences of ignoring the evaluative aspect of knowledge, and of blurring the fact/value distinction, see my “Toulmin’s Evolutionary Epistemology,” Philosophical Quarterly 24(1974): 60–69.
The Japanese painter, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, reports (in B. Ghiselin, ed., The Creative Process: A Symposium [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952], p. 55) that this was in fact an artistic problem which he tried to solve. The idea that the artist confronts objective problems is, of course, well known to any reader of Gombrich’s brilliant Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). I should mention that in my view an artist’s subjective desire to express some idea, emotion, or vision itself constitutes an objective artistic problem — namely, the problem of how to express it given the means at his disposal. Such a problem may, in fact, only be soluble if the artist invents or discovers new means, not previously at his disposal. We might call this, paraphrasing Lakatos, a “creative problem-shift.”
Ben Shahn, “The Biography of a Painting,” in V. Tomas, ed., p. 32.
It might here be objected that the fact that creative people talk of “inspiration,” “Divine Grace,” “sudden and unexpected ideas,” “bi- sociation,” and so on when describing their own creative work invalidates my argument. I do not agree — such sudden flashes of “illumination” are invariably preceded by the production of unsuccessful efforts which themselves help to shape the very “illumination” in question. Moreover, it might be said that examples such as Coleridge’s composing of Kubla Kahn refutes my suggestion, in that it seems to have emerged full-blown from Coleridge’s head without the benefit of any interaction with “intermediary” products. Again, I am not so sure — at the very least Coleridge had to critically interact with his “finished” product before accepting it as finished, and this means that before this conscious acceptance the product can be thought of as an “intermediary” one even though it may be identical to the “finished” one!
Quoted in Banesh Hoffmann and Helen Dukas, Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel ( New York: Viking, 1972 ), p. 124.
This fact about creativity calls to mind what could be called “Plato’s Paradox”: namely, that one cannot search for something unless one knows what one is searching for. But plausibly one cannot know what one is searching for until one has actually found it. Hence, one cannot search for something until one has found it. In other words, one cannot search for something! This argument is not simply a sophism, for it indicates that one must either have some imprecise idea of what one is looking for, or else some recognitional criteria for saying that one has found what one is looking for. The importance of such recognitional criteria for creative activity will be discussed in Section 7.
Karl Popper, “Replies to my Critics,” in P. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Karl Popper (LaSalle: Open Court, 1974), vol. II, p. 1061.
Interestingly, the idea that a creative product is a novel problem-solution enables us to explain how even old ideas may qualify as creative products. For the required novelty is no longer sheer temporal novelty; rather it is the novelty of a solution relative to a problem. And an old idea, invoked in a new problem-situation, could constitute a novel solution. We might, for example, construe Dalton’s creativity in this light, for Dalton recognized in the old physical ideas of the atomists the potential solution to a pressing chemical problem (that of explaining the law of constant proportions) and thus built his “new system of chemical philosophy” upon an atomistic basis. In other words, Dalton did not create the idea of atoms, but he used that idea creatively.
I owe this way of seeing the thing to Stanley Eveling.
It might be thought that this entails that creative contributions to “methodology” or “criteriology” (i.e., the theory of rational standards) is impossible. This is a mistake: a novel methodological idea which solves an outstanding problem in our current methodological theories may actually constitute an improvement from the point of view of the older standards themselves. This, in effect, is how the rational improvement of rational standards is itself possible. Agassi has christened this view “the bootstrap theory of rationality” and suggests that of a series of criteria of rationality each can constitute “an improvement on its predecessor by its predecessor’s own lights.” See Joseph Agassi, “Criteria for Plausible Arguments,”Mind 83 (1974): 406–16. For further elabora tion of, and suggested modifications to, Agassi’s idea of bootstrap rationality, see my “Historicist Relativism and Bootstrap Rationality”, TheMonist 60 (1977): 509–39.
It should be clear, I think, that the notion of transcendence here developed is not an absolute one — it admits of degrees. For differing products may meet the four demands to a greater or lesser extent; or a product may meet only some of the demands and not others. For example, it might meet demands 1, 2, and 4, yet fail to meet demand 3 (i.e., it fails to necessitate any alterations in the background). Thus, from the point of view of this paper it is perfectly sensible to talk of degrees of creativity as well. This seems to me to be a crucially valuable result. In fact, I would say that any theory which made creativity into an “all-or-nothing” thing (as Koestler’s “bisociative” theory seems to do) should, for that very reason, be rejected.
One can, I think, go even further and prove that no such problem-solving algorithm (call it “F”) can exist. For F would “map” problems into solutions (i.e., Solution=F(Problem)). But problems are themselves functions of the background of prior products (i.e., Problem=f(Back- ground)). Combining these two we get that Solution=F(f(Background)). But solutions often contradict this background. How can a function map an x into something inconsistent withx? Only, I suspect, by being itself inconsistent. So no consistent problem-solving algorithm of the type envisaged can exist. And, of course, an inconsistent one would be of no use whatsoever, since out of it we could get anything as a solution to anything!
E. Vivas, “Naturalism and Creativity,” in V. Tomas, ed., p. 90.
Banesh Hoffmann and Helen Dukas, p. 119.
The notion of “plastic control” is due to Popper. The reason that the control of problems and standards is only “plastic” or “soft” (as opposed to “cast-iron”) is that these can themselves be modified by the very attempts to solve them or satisfy them.
The psychologist Donald Campbell has already suggested a “Darwinian” model of the creative process in his paper “Blind Variation and Selective Retention in Creative Thought as in Other Knowledge Processes,” Psychological Review 67 (1960): 380–400. Where my account differs from his, however, is in seeing this “Darwinian” process as under the plastic control of the creative job specification. In a sense, from my point of view, Campbell’s process is just a teeny bit too blind.
Reported in Popper’s Objective Knowledge, p. 180. The idea of self-transcendence has been beautifully explored in Gombrich’s paper “Art and Self-Transcendence,” in A. Tiselius and S. Nilsson, eds., The Place of Value in a World of Facts (New York: Wiley Interscience Division, 1970), pp. 125–33.
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Briskman, L. (1981). Creative Product and Creative Process in Science and Art. In: Dutton, D., Krausz, M. (eds) The Concept of Creativity in Science and Art. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5083-2_7
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