Creativity and Philosophy

Berys Gaut, Matthew Kieran, Berys Gaut, Matthew Kieran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138827684
• eBook ISBN: 9781351199773
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Creativity matters. We want people to be more creative and admire those who are. Yet creativity is deeply puzzling. Just what is it to be creative? Why is it valuable? Who or what can be creative and how?

Creativity and Philosophy is an outstanding collection of specially commissioned chapters by leading philosophers who explore these problems and many more. It provides a comprehensive and creative picture of creativity, including the following themes:

• creativity as a virtue, imagination, epistemic virtue, moral virtue and personal vice;
• creativity with and without value, the definition of creativity, creative failures and suffering;
• creativity in nature, divine creativity and human agency;
• naturalistic explanations of creativity and the extended mind;
• creativity in philosophy, mathematics and logic, and the role of heuristics;
• creativity in art, morality and politics;
• individual and group creativity.

A major feature of the collection is that it explores creativity not only from the perspective of art and aesthetics, but also from a variety of philosophical disciplines, including epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, philosophy of science, political philosophy and ethics.

The volume is essential reading for anyone fascinated by creativity, whether their interests lie in philosophy, music, art and visual studies, literature, psychology, neuroscience, management or education, or they are simply intent on learning more about this vital human trait.

1Philosophising about creativity

Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran

We live in a creativity-obsessed society. Many of our heroes, whether in science, technology or art, are celebrated because of their creativity; entire professions think of themselves as composed of ‘creatives’, and many of our education policies and priorities are directed at enhancing creativity (Robinson and Aronica 2016). Given this interest, it is no surprise that work on creativity and associated phenomena in disciplines such as psychology has boomed over the past sixty years or more (Sawyer 2012). In contrast, over the same period, philosophy has had comparatively little to say on the topic, despite the fact that philosophers as great as Plato and Kant have made significant contributions to it. Things have, however, started to change in the last fifteen years or so, and one can chart the rise in philosophical interest in creativity through a series of anthologies: Gaut and Livingston (2003), Krausz, Dutton and Bardsley (2009), and Paul and Kaufman (2014). The present volume builds on these volumes, along with other recent writings in the philosophy of creativity, to help advance and shape the emerging field of the philosophy of creativity. We have asked twenty-one philosophers, each prominent in his or her field, to write about creativity; for many of them, this is the first time that they have published on the topic. The topics discussed are wide-ranging: whether creativity is a virtue, its connection or lack thereof to value, its relation to agency, whether it can be explained and if so how, and how it operates in multiple domains, including philosophy, mathematics, art, morality and politics. These issues are discussed from a variety of perspectives, sometimes opposing ones. As groundwork for understanding the positions advanced, the present chapter first surveys the state of the art in some central issues in the philosophy of creativity, and then summarises the chapters in the volume.

1The background

1.1 Philosophy and creativity

Why should we be interested in creativity from a philosophical point of view?

First, clarifying the nature and value of creativity is important given everyday beliefs about creativity and the value attached to it. Assumptions about what creativity is, why it is valuable and how to promote being creative might be paradoxical or deeply misguided. Society tends to uncritically celebrate and promote creativity, but can’t some kinds of creativity be bad, for instance that of terrorists or torturers? And we need to know if policies or practices can achieve what they set out to do and, if not, what we should be aiming for instead (Robinson and Aronica 2016).

Second, as noted, psychology has had much to say about creativity. Philosophical approaches may cast light on or challenge assumptions made in psychology and vice versa. Intellectual progress can be made when problems from one domain are addressed by another or worked on together across disciplines. Psychological measures of creativity, such as Guilford’s Alternative Uses Test and the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, often involve asking people to imagine as many novel associations or unusual uses for an object as possible. Yet if, as some philosophers argue, creativity involves a value condition or certain kinds of dispositions, then these measures can only be testing an element of creative potential. Philosophical work can also challenge psychological assumptions by bringing to bear alternative explanations. There might be, for example, good philosophical reasons for holding that delusions involve imaginings rather than corrupted or irrational beliefs (Currie 2000; Gerrans 2014). Conversely, empirical work can pose challenges for philosophy. Many philosophers along with scientists often assume that the functionality of mental imagery underwrites abilities such as perceptual framing, memory, spatio-temporal manipulation and perceptual imaginings (Lacey and Lawson 2013; Thomas 2017). It is also common to assume that imagery plays a key role in creativity (Bailes and Bishop 2012; Chavez 2016). Yet, some psychological work suggests that many people lack any experiential sense of mental imagery without thereby impacting the ability to perform associated mental tasks (Phillips 2014). This could pose a problem for linking mental imagery with creativity, or push philosophers to come up with different accounts of the representational role of imagery (Phillips 2014) or the nature of mental imaging (Thomas 2009, 2017: §4.5).

So, thinking philosophically about creativity may advance our understanding of central issues, take up challenges from elsewhere and inform practical attitudes.

1.2 Constraints on defining creativity

Defining just what constitutes creativity is a controversial matter. Most people assume that there is a univocal sense to ‘creativity’ that any definition should seek to capture, though it could be that there are distinct, related senses (Wreen 2015). A factory worker may create a new screw, by pressing materials on a machine to make this particular new token of a type that he has instantiated many times before. The worker is creative in the sense of bringing a new token into the world. Yet we would not ordinarily describe the act as creative since the term is normally used to pick out something much more demanding; in particular that what is created must be interestingly new in relation to the kind of thing that has gone before. If this is the sense of creativity we are interested in, then a constraint on any adequate definition must be the element of novelty.

But things can be new in trivial ways, so some have sought extra conditions. For instance, Boden also requires that the new thing be surprising (Boden 2004: 1). A number of questions arise. Must it be surprising to the person involved, or to those making the judgement? And must this be a condition for all creative acts as such? Perhaps if someone were regularly creative, we would not be surprised by her output. Others have required that the creative item not be obvious (Grant 2012), and similar questions arise about to whom it should not be obvious.

Many philosophers have argued that creative acts have to be defined not just in terms of output features but also the process that gives rise to them. One way to show why is to consider the relationship between originality and creativity. In principle, something can be original without being the upshot of creativity. Scientific discoveries such as identifying quinine as an anti-malarial agent or Alexander Fleming’s famously abandoned Petri dish containing a variety of Penicillium can result from uncreative, fortuitous accidents. A child enjoying playing could accidentally spill paint onto a newspaper thereby creating a new, beautiful poem formed by the only remaining legible words. We wouldn’t thereby characterise the child as creative in any interesting sense. Even activity intentionally devoted toward producing something original looks insufficient. An entirely mechanical search, trial and error procedure leading to a new discovery hardly seems the essence of creativity. Hence, the thought that any adequate definition of creativity must also pick out something about the kind of process involved (Gaut 2003: 151; Stokes 2011; Kieran 2014a: 126–128). These accounts hold that exercises of some features of agency are constitutive of the creative process, but others argue that the creative process need not be agential at all: biological evolutionary processes may be creative (Dennett 1995: 70).

In terms of output, some hold that a creative process need only generate novelty to count as a truly creative act. By contrast, in line with Kant, others hold that more than mere novelty must be involved (Hausman 1985). One thought is that this must be so, given that ‘creative’ is an honorific term and we condemn rather than praise ‘original nonsense’ to use Kant’s phrase (Kant 2000: 186). However, we do seem to recognise that some acts can be creative failures so the creative process and the ­successful ­realization of value in outputs might come apart. Exactly how matters are spelt out on this issue may then interact with just what kind of value creativity involves or aims at. It may, for example, be the value of the kind of process involved that matters, whether the resultant output is valuable or not, or that what matters is that the process non-accidentally could lead to the production of new, valuable outputs or, it could be argued, this just shows that a process really doesn’t count as creative unless something valuable is produced. Similar issues arise if immoral acts can be creative, though some have denied that this is possible (Novitz 1999).

1.3 Types of creativity

Thus far we have been talking about creativity tout court, but we should distinguish between different types of creativity. The most influential distinction in the literature is Boden’s contrast between psychological and historical creativity. Boden characterises an action as psychologically creative if and only if someone produces something surprising and valuable that is new to the person involved (Boden 2004: 2, 43–46). To use Boden’s own example, if a twelve-year-old who had never come across Shakespeare compared sleep’s healing power with ‘knitting up a raveled sleeve’ then you would have to say this was very creative for her. This is consistent with the twelve-year-old’s comparison not being historically creative given that Shakespeare got there first. So, what is historical creativity? Historical creativity is a special class of psychological creativity where no one else in human history has come up with the thought before (Boden 2004: 2, 43–46). We might want to make some further elaborations or modifications in line with the spirit of Boden’s contrast. In judgements of creativity we often have contrast classes in mind, so, for instance, we might think that the twelve-year-old in Boden’s example is not merely psychologically creative with respect to herself, but also creative for a twelve-year-old or for young people more generally. We also make judgements of historical creativity that are indexed to particular epochs, cultures or traditions. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press was historically creative in the west, though Chinese monks in the east had been using block printing for five hundred years or more before. Hence, as with other kinds of adjectives (Liao, McNally and Meskin 2016), describing something as creative may be relative to context and comparison class.

Boden goes further in arguing that there are three very different kinds of creativity (Boden 2004: 3–6). Combinational creativity occurs when an act is creative in combining familiar elements in new unfamiliar or unlikely ways (Boden 2004: 40–41). A coach might come up with a new kind of pass in a football game or a poet coin the metaphor ‘sea of faith’ through just this kind of recombination. A different, deeper kind of ­creativity, Boden argues, is exploratory creativity: it involves explorations of conceptual space giving rise to something that it had not been anticipated could be realised in the presumed framework (Boden 2004: 58–61). A philosopher might come up with new, radical, unexpected implications from shared assumptions or a musician invent a new sub-genre within electronic dance music in just such a fashion. The third and most radical kind of creativity, Boden argues, is transformational in the sense that what people then think is ‘something which, with respect to the conceptual spaces in their minds, they couldn’t have thought before’ (Boden 2004: 6; also see 61–87). Much of Boden’s account remains controversial. To cite just a few points, people have questioned what exactly a conceptual scheme amounts to and whether radical creativity requires pre-existing conceptual spaces to transform (Novitz 1999; Beaney 2005: 177–192) or looked to give alternative accounts of the claim that creative thoughts could not have been had before (Stokes 2011). Nonetheless, Boden’s account is the most influential typology to be found in the contemporary philosophical literature.

1.4 Imagination

It is one thing to classify creative actions, it is quite another to say what is involved more substantively in the underlying processes. Traditionally, creativity has been held to depend on the workings of the imagination thought of either as a mental faculty or as a suite of mechanisms. A scientist imagines new alternative hypotheses that might explain the data. An artist imagines the look of a scene, how the central figure might be composed, and the possible symbolic associations required to generate the desired effect. A footballer might imagine different ways to go in deciding which pass is the most effective. From calling to mind alternate courses of action and entertaining hypotheses to the construction of perceptual imaginings, the imagination seems fundamental to the creative process. Few think that the involvement of the imagination in forming mental representations is sufficient for a process to be creative. But the idea that the imagination must be at work in the creative process is very common. Hence, there are important questions about just what the imagination is and how exactly it works in generating creative thoughts and actions.

Standardly, we distinguish between different kinds of imaginings (Gendler 2016). It is common to distinguish propositional imagining, imagining that P, from non-propositional imagining which is then divided into various sub-types. Propositional imagining involves representing that something bears some kind of relation to what is or might be the case. I imagine, say, that a colleague is in her office or that she might have gone to get a coffee. This might be contrasted with various kinds of dramatic imagination, imagining from the inside what it is like to be a certain kind of person or imagining affectively responding in certain ways. These kinds of imaginings can be contrasted with perceptual imaginings which are standardly taken to involve mental imagery.

Now the imagination seems to be a productive faculty capable of generating new thoughts, ideas and actions. Yet, the mere involvement of the imagination seems to be insufficient for creativi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Philosophising about creativity
• PART I Creativity as a virtue
• PART II Creativity and value
• PART III Creativity and agency
• PART IV Explaining creativity
• PART V Creativity in philosophy and mathematics
• PART VI Creativity in art, morality and politics
• Index