Models Of Discovery And Creativity

Since the origin of the modern sciences, our views on discovery and creativity had a remarkable history. Originally, discovery was seen as an integral part of methodology and the logic of discovery as algorithmic or nearly algorithmic. During the nineteenth century, conceptions in line with romanticism led to the famous opposition between the context of discovery and the context of justification, culminating in a view that banned discovery from methodology. The revival of the methodological investigation of discovery, which started some thirty years ago, derived its major impetus from historical and sociological studies of the sciences and from developments within cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Today, a large majority of philosophers of science agrees that the classical conception as well as the romantic conception are mistaken. Against the classical conception, it is generally accepted that truly novel discoveries are not the result of simply applying some standardized procedure. Against the romantic conception, it is rejected that discoveries are produced by unstructured flashes of insight. An especially important result of the contemporary study concerns the availability of (descriptive and normative) models for explaining discoveries and creative processes. Descriptive models mainly aim at explaining the origin of novel products; normative models moreover address the question how rational researchers should proceed when confronted with problems for which a standard procedure is missing. The present book provides an overview of these models and of the important changes they induced within methodology. As appears from several papers, the methodological study of discovery and creativity led to profound changes in our conceptions of justification and acceptance, of rationality, of scientific change, and of conceptual change. The book contains contributions from both historians and philosophers of science. All of them, however, are methodological in the contemporary sense of the term. The central values of this methodology are empirical accurateness, clarity and precision, and rationality. The different contributions realize these values by their interdisciplinary nature. Some philosophically oriented papers rely on historical case studies and results from the cognitive sciences, others on recent results from the computer sciences and/or non-standard logics. The historically oriented papers address central philosophical questions and hypotheses.

This first volume of the Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi represents his work on Art and Creativity. Starting with his seminal 1964 study on creativity up to his 2010 publication in Newsweek, the volume spans over four decades of research and writing and clearly shows Csikszentmihalyi’s own development as an academic, psychologist, researcher and person. Unconventional and unorthodox in his approach, Csikszentmihalyi chose the topic of creativity as a field of study believing it would help him be a better psychologist and advance his understanding of how to live a better life. The chapters in this volume trace the history of the study of creativity back to the days of Guilford and research on IQ and Jacob Getzels’ work on creativity and intelligence. Firmly grounded in that history, yet extending it in new directions, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi started his life-long study on artistic creativity. His first extensive study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago enabled him to observe, test and interview fine art students drawing in a studio. The study formed the very basis of all his work on the subject and has resulted in several articles, represented in this volume, on such creativity-related concepts as problem solving versus problem finding, the personality of the artist, the influence of the social context, creativity as a social construction, developmental issues and flow. The main contribution to the topic of creativity and also the main concept explored in this volume, is the Systems Model of Creativity. Seven chapters in this volume discuss the development of this conceptual model and theory.

What factors affect creativity and the generation of creative images? What factors affect the ability to reinterpret those images? Research described in this book indicates that expectations constrain both of these attributes of creativity. Characteristics of the imagined pattern, such as cohesiveness or its psychological goodness, also affect image generation and reinterpretation. Other evidence indicates that images can be combined mentally to yield new, manipulable composites. Cognitive models encompass the research and extend it to fields as diverse as architecture, music, and problem solving.

Make to Know: From Spaces of Uncertainty to Creative Discovery will change the way you think about creativity. The book upends popular notions of innate artistic and visionary genius and probes instead the event of discovery that happens through the act of making. In contrast to the classic tale of Michelangelo, who 'saw the angel in the stone', the artists and designers Buchman interviews for this book talk about knowing their work as they engage in the doing. Make to Know explores the revelatory nature of the creative journey itself. As Buchman weaves together the vivid stories of his multiple conversations, we learn about writers of all stripes as they confront creative spaces of uncertainty 'the blank page'; about visual artists and what they understand from the materials they encounter; about designers and architects and the iterative process of solving problems; and about actors and musicians facing the surprises of improvisational performance. Make to Know is a book that will, ultimately, open a path to your own making, and, in the end, will have significant implications for how you live. Make to Know presents a way of thinking that democratizes creativity and uncovers a process that leads to knowing both ones work and oneself. It is relevant to anyone interested in why creativity matters.

The volume is based on the papers that were presented at the Interna tional Conference Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery (MBR'98), held at the Collegio Ghislieri, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, in December 1998. The papers explore how scientific thinking uses models and explanatory reasoning to produce creative changes in theories and concepts. The study of diagnostic, visual, spatial, analogical, and temporal rea soning has demonstrated that there are many ways of performing intelligent and creative reasoning that cannot be described with the help only of tradi tional notions of reasoning such as classical logic. Traditional accounts of scientific reasoning have restricted the notion of reasoning primarily to de ductive and inductive arguments. Understanding the contribution of model ing practices to discovery and conceptual change in science requires ex panding scientific reasoning to include complex forms of creative reasoning that are not always successful and can lead to incorrect solutions. The study of these heuristic ways of reasoning is situated at the crossroads of philoso phy, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and logic; that is, at the heart of cognitive science. There are several key ingredients common to the various forms of model based reasoning to be considered in this book. The models are intended as in terpretations of target physical systems, processes, phenomena, or situations. The models are retrieved or constructed on the basis of potentially satisfying salient constraints of the target domain.

Explains the creative process and shows how creativity can enrich lives.

This book brings together writers who have studied creative thinkers in different arenas--such as the various arts (poetry, fiction, visual art, music, dance, acting), sciences (psychology, mathematics, physics, engineering, computer science), and commun