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This entry provides a substantive overview of research and debates concerning creativity in philosophy and related fields. Topics covered include definitions of creativity, whether creativity can be learned, whether it can be explained, attempts to explain creativity in cognitive science, and whether computer programs or AI systems can be creative. |
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Creativity has often been declared, especially by philosophers, as the last frontier of science. The assumption is that it will defy explanation forever. I will defend two claims in order to oppose this assumption and to demystify creativity: (1) the perspective that creativity cannot be explained wrongly identifies creativity with what I shall call metaphysical freedom; (2) the Darwinian approach to creativity, a prominent naturalistic account of creativity, fails to give an explanation of creativity, because it confuses conceptual issues with (...) |
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David Hume's famous riddle of induction implies a second problem related to the question of whether the laws and principles of nature might change in the course of time. Claims have been made that modern developments in physics and astrophysics corroborate the translational invariance of the laws of physics in time. However, the appearance of a new general principle of nature, which might not be derivable from the known laws of physics, or that might actually be a non-physical one (this (...) |
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In this paper, I offer a detailed reconstruction and a critical analysis of Abraham Maslow’s neglected psychological reading of Thomas Kuhn’s famous dichotomy between ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ science, which Maslow briefly expounded four years after the first edition of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in his small book The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance, and which relies heavily on his extensive earlier general writing in the motivational and personality psychology. Maslow’s Kuhnian ideas, put forward as part of a larger (...) |
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Increasing the “truth per dollar” of money spent on science is one legitimate long-run goal of the economics of science. But before this goal can be achieved, we need to increase our knowledge of the successes and failures of past and current reward structures of science. This essay reviews what economists have learned about the behavior of scientists and the reward structure of science. One important use of such knowledge will be to help policy-makers create a reward structure that is (...) |
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What is creativity? One new idea may be creative, whereas another is merely new: What's the difference? And how is creativity possible? These questions about human creativity can be answered, at least in outline, using computational concepts. There are two broad types of creativity, improbabilist and impossibilist. Improbabilist creativity involves novel combinations of familiar ideas. A deeper type involves METCS: the mapping, exploration, and transformation of conceptual spaces. It is impossibilist, in that ideas may be generated which – with respect (...) |
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The relationship between Legal Realism and Legal Positivism has been a recurrent source of debate. The question has been further complicated by the related difficulty of assessing the internal relationship between the two main original strands of Legal Realism: American and Scandinavian. This paper suggests considering American and Scandinavian Realism as instantiations of forward-looking and backward-looking rule skepticism respectively. This distinction brings into sharp relief not only the fundamentally different relationship between each of these two Realist schools and Legal Positivism (...) |
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This paper is an extended exploration of Mead's phrase the emergence of the novel. I describe and characterize emergent systems-complex dynamical systems that display behavior that cannot be predicted from a full and complete description of the component units of the system. Emergence has become an influential concept in contemporary cognitive science [A. Clark Being there, Cambridge: MIT Press], complexity theory [W. Bechtel & R.C. Richardson Discovering complexity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press], artificial life [R.A. Brooks & P. Maes Artificial (...) |
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Although much creativity research has suggested that creativity is influenced by cultural and social factors, these have been minimally explored in the context of mathematics and mathematics learning. This problematically limits who is seen as mathematically creative and who can enter the discipline of mathematics. This paper proposes a framework of creativity that is based in what it means to know or do mathematics and accepts that creativity is something that can be nurtured in all students. Prominent mathematical epistemologies held (...) |
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Creativity is generally thought to be the production of things that are novel and valuable. Humans are unique in the extent of their creativity, which plays a central role in innovation and problem solving, as well as in the arts. But what are the cognitive sources of novelty? More particularly, what are the cognitive sources of stochasticity in creative production? I will argue that they belong to two broad categories. One is associative, enabling the selection of goal-relevant ideas that have (...) |
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The way scientific discovery has been conceptualized has changed drastically in the last few decades: its relation to logic, inference, methods, and evolution has been deeply reloaded. The ‘philosophical matrix’ moulded by logical empiricism and analytical tradition has been challenged by the ‘friends of discovery’, who opened up the way to a rational investigation of discovery. This has produced not only new theories of discovery, but also new ways of practicing it in a rational and more systematic way. Ampliative rules, (...) |
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The dissertation criticizes two analogical applications of Darwinism to the spheres of mind and culture: the Darwinian approach to creativity and memetics. These theories rely on three basic analogies: the ontological analogy states that the basic ontological units of culture are so-called memes, which are replicators like genes; the origination analogy states that novelty in human creativity emerges in a "blind" Darwinian manner; and the explanatory units of selection analogy states that memes are "egoistic" and that they can spread independently (...) |
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In this article, I limn the remarkable ascent of Albert Einstein and Wassily Kandinsky into our cultural pantheon. I depict how both figures mastered and transcended their respective fields, and how they called into question long-established disciplinary assumptions and practices. I also demonstrate how the creative works of Einstein and Kandinsky constructed, and were constructed by, the reality we now call "modern.". |
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Everyday artistic creativity is downplayed in our schools, our lives, our culture. Yet here is an essential language of our lives, opening us to important ways of knowing, truth, beauty, and means for creative coping, as individuals and as cultures. Views of John Dewey and Suzanne Langer are each considered. A devaluation of artistic creativity may also reflect unacknowledged biases related to emotional "versus" intellectual knowing, gender stereotyping, science "versus" art, individualism "versus" interdependence, false stereotypes of creative "unhealth," and eminent (...) |
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The focus of the current study is the individual and environmental attributes of inventiveness among children and adolescents. Research was conducted on the young inventors who were part of a nation-wide inventive ideation contest for children and adolescents in P. R. China. A total of 621 4th to 12th grade students from 112 schools all over China participated in the study. Among them, 38 reported holding one or more patents. Independent t-test showed, compared to their lower-level counterparts, higher-level young inventors (...) |
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