THE COMPLEXITY OF CREATIVITY SYNTHESE LIBRARY STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY, LOGIC, METHODOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Managing Editor: JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University Editors: DIRK VAN DALEN, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands DONALD DAVIDSON, University of California, Berkeley THEO A.F. KUIPERS, University ofGroningen, The Netherlands PATRICK SUPPES, Stanford University, California JAN WOLENSKI, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland VOLUME258 THE COMPLEXITY OF CREATIVITY Edited by AKE E. ANDERSSON Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, Sweden and NILS-ERIC SAHLIN Department of Philosophy, Gothenburg University and Lund University, Sweden SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-90-481-4778-6 ISBN 978-94-015-8788-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-8788-4 Printed on acid-free pap er AlI Rights Reserved © 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1997 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. Table of Contents Editor's preamble vii The constraints of knowledge Margaret A. Boden The gist of creativity Ingar Brinck 5 Creativity and the evolutionary viewpoint Soren Hallden 17 The internal breeding-ground of creativity Gudmund Smith 23 Process and creation Jason W. Brown 35 A fourth grade experience Donald G. Saari 51 Value-change and creativity N.-E. Sahlin 59 On creativity in reasoning Jaakko Hintikka 67 Toward a mathematical modeling of creativity Donald G. Saari and Anneli L. Saari 79 Creativity, -Some historical footnotes from science and art Anders Karlqvist 105 The world, the mind and mathematics John L. Casti 115 Creativity, complexity and qualitative economic development Ake E. Andersson 139 EDITORS' PREAMBLE This is a book on the concepts, theories, models and social consequences of creativity. The articles are the outcome of a workshop on creativity held in Venice in October 1994. The workshop was organized by the Swedish Insti tute for Futures Studies as part of the larger project The Cognitive Revolu tion. The role of textbooks in the teaching of creativity was discussed at the workshop. One of the participants, Gudmund Smith, asserted that not read ing textbooks might be the most creativity enhancing technology in educa tion. However, this is not a textbook, nor is it a set of simple instructions of how to become creative, but we hope that this volume contains enough of thought provoking material to spark off a creative process. A.E.A. N.-E. S. Stockholm, June 1996 MARGARET A. BODEN THE CONSTRAINTS OF KNOWLEDGE People sometimes speak as though knowledge has little to do with creativity, or even prevents it. This dismissive attitude toward the role of cognition in creativity takes two main forms. On the one hand, cognition is contrasted with motivation. Naturally enough, the creative role of motivation is stressed by psychodynamicists in general. But even cognitive psychologists allow that the reasons why one individual achieves creative greatness (what I have called H-creativity (Boden, I990, ch. 3)) while another, inhabiting the same cognitive niche, does not, lie pri marily in differences in motivation (Perkins, I 98 I). The precise motives may differ, but their intensity does not. H-creators are driven, and in tum drive the people in their social ambit even unto death. Florence Nightingale is a famous nineteenth-century example: lying on her sickbed, she dictated (in both senses) to her male helpers-some of whom sickened and died under the strain. Seven twentieth-century examples Gandhi, Freud, Martha Graham, T. S. Eliot, Stravinsky, Einstein, and Picasso -have been described by Howard Gardner (I993), whose study makes it abundantly clear that H-creative personalities are, to put it delicately, "diffi cult". In their singlemindedness in pursuing their creative mission, and their near-total lack of concern for other people's interests, each is a match for Nightingale. On the other hand, it is said that knowledge is unnecessary for creativity, and/or that it can stifle it at birth. Einstein (we are often reminded) was a mere clerk, not a university scientist, when he did his pioneering work. As such, he was free from the institutionalization of his motives (no fear of challenging his boss)-and of his knowledge, too. There are many other less exalted examples of "outsiders" coming up with H-creative ideas, people who were either partially ignorant of or not professionally committed to the current orthodoxy. Thomas Kuhn reminded us how difficult it is to change one's mind, especially about systematic beliefs: science changes because old scientists die (Kuhn, I962). Similar remarks apply also to the arts, although the deadening effect of orthodoxy is arguably less marked here, because of the (relative) lack of systematicity and the post-Romantic emphasis on novelty and individual expression for their own sake. Such views can lead, for instance, to young children being encouraged to express their own views in their writing without being taught the discipline of writing to help them do so. While this may be healthy as a temporary A. E. Andersson and N.-E. Sahlin ( eds.), The Complexity of Creativity, 1-4. © 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2 MARGARET A. BODEN measure, and as a reaction against pedantic grammaticism and cultural im perialism, in the long run it does the child no favours. Creativity is founded in discipline. I do not mean the discipline of hard work (George Bernard Shaw's "99% perspiration"), though that is indeed necessary. Rather, I mean the cognitive constraints which form and inform creative ideas, and which make them possible. Much of the "99% perspiration" is needed for becoming familiar with these constraints. To be sure, one type of creativity is relatively unconstrained. In this ("com binational") type, the valued novelty consists in an unusual combination of familiar ideas-as in poetic imagery, or analogy (Boden, 1990, ch. 6). Even here, however, not anything goes. The poet is, if anything, even more careful than the prose-writer to find /e mot juste. Even Joyce did not try to explode the reader's consciousness with a merely random sequence of concepts. Moreover, those artists who deliber ately use random methods in generating their artworks do so only against a background of artistic discipline. This applies in all domains, from Mozart's dice-music to Brian Eno's oeuvre, or from the "self-contradictions" of surre alism to the mY-assembly novel-published not as a bound volume but as sections loose in a box, which (except for the first and last) can be read in a random order (Johnson, 1973). In general, randomness (and serendipity) can contribute to creativity, but only if it can be intelligibly related to the relevant cognitive background (Boden, 1990, ch. 9; 1995). Likewise with analogy. One can compare anything with anything else (a raven with a writing-desk, for instance). But if an analogy is to be developed for rhetorical or problem-solving purposes, the two analogues must be matched in some detail. This may require very hard thinking, by orator or oncologist. The other type of creativity involves the exploration and transformation of conceptual spaces (Boden, 1990; 1994, ch. 4). These spaces are styles of thinking, or sets of generative constraints. They are positive constraints, not negative ones: they express what may be thought, not what must not be thought. Tacitly, however, they do constrain in the negative sense. For if an idea is unthinkable within a particular conceptual space (as the benzene-ring was, within early organic chemistry), then it cannot be thought unless that space can be changed in some way. Superficial tweakings and fundamental transformations of the dimensions of the space are both possible. But the latter is more rare. - Why? What is the nature of the mental "inertia" which makes it more difficult to transform a conceptual space than merely to tweak it? Or, if the transformation does take place, why is it less likely to be accepted-even in a brainstorming session, where (so the instruction has it) "anything goes"? The latter question reminds us that the very concept of creativity is intrin sically evaluative. To call an idea creative is to commit onseself to the view that it is both new and interesting. To be sure, what counts as interesting will THE CONSTRAINTS OF KNOWLEDGE 3 differ from domain to domain, and to some extent from person to person. Accordingly, much dispute about "creativity" focusses not so much on the novelty of the disputed idea, but rather on its value. Even in the sciences, such disputes may last for many years (Schaffer, 1994). This need for evalu ation helps us to see why transformation is even more problematic than tweaking. Transformations of conceptual spaces present two difficulties, neither of which applies in such strong degree where more superficial changes are in question. First, the novel (transformed) idea may not be readily intelligible. In other words, the newly transformed conceptual space is not easily naviga ble, because it is too different from the previous, familiar, one. Second, a transformation may imply so many changes in the local topography of the conceptual space that it fails to meet certain (empirical or stylistic) criteria we are not prepared to give up. We may be so loath to abandon these criteria that the novel idea is rejected immediately, being regarded as absurd. In order to judge such matters with sensitivity, and to adapt other aspects of the conceptual space so as to cohere with the surprising transformation, expert knowledge is needed. For even transformational creativity is not the abandonment of all constraints. (That way, lies unintelligibility.) Deep and detailed knowledge of the conceptual space concerned is required. It is needed in evaluating the relative importance of different con straints, in choosing which ones to drop or deform in the case of a clash, and in deciding which transformations are worth following up and which are not. Almost anyone could unthinkingly suggest applying a transformational heuristic, such as "drop a constraint" or "consider the negative". But not anyone could actually apply the heuristic: one has to have some idea of what the current constraints are, in order to drop or negate any of them. So a competent geometer (Lobachevsky, for instance) can suggest dropping Euclid's last axiom, because expert geometers know that this is the one which intro duces the problematic notion of parallelism, and this is the one which seems to be conceptually independent of the other axioms. Similarly, a competent chemist (such as Kekule, puzzling over the structure of benzene) can suggest turning a string molecule into a ring molecule, because chemists know that the behaviour of a molecule depends not only on its constitutent atoms but also on their neighbour-relations, or topology. Above all, relatively few peo ple could competently (and imaginatively) evaluate the novel result of apply ing the transformational heuristic. The relation between constraints and creativity, then, is a subtle one. Con straints there must be, for it is cognitive constraints which defme conceptual spaces, old and new, and which enable us to find our way through them. They function as generative structures and exploratory guidelines, without which we could neither come up with relevant new ideas nor appreciate them once we had done so. But the constraints must not be too constraining.