Phil/Psych 447

Seminar in Cognitive Science

Week 2: Theories of Creativity

Question from Last Week

How can combinations of the 6 fields of cognitive science increase understanding of creativity?

Questions about Theories of Creativity

  1. What phenomena about creativity should a General Theory of Creativity be able to explain? What questions would it answer?
  2. What would be the form or structure of a theory of creativity?
  3. How would competing theories of creativity be evaluated?

Questions about Kozbelt (ch. 2)

  1. Are there magnitudes of creativity? What determines them?
  2. Are the 10 categories of theories coherent (developmental, psychometric, economic, stage, cognitive, problem solving, problem finding, evolutionary, typological, systems)?
  3. What category of theory do you think best explains creative phenomena?
  4. Are economic theories of creativity compatible with cognitive ones?
  5. Are evolutionary theories of creativity compatible with cognitive ones?
  6. Are typological theories explanatory?
  7. What are the components of a systems view of creativity?
  8. How should future theorizing about creativity proceed?

Questions about Plucker (ch. 3)

  1. Are definitions of creativity useful?
  2. What is the relation between creativity and intelligence?
  3. What can psychometrics tell us about creativity?
  4. To what extent does personality contribute to creativity

Notes Toward a Theory of Creativity (Thagard & Stewart 2011)

  1. A theory is a description of mechanisms that causally explain important phenomena.
  2. A mechanism is a system of parts whose interactions produce regular changes.
  3. A cognitive mechanism consists of mental representations and computational processes.
  4. A neural mechanism consists of neural populations and their firing patterns.
  5. A social mechanism consists of people and their communications.
  6. A general theory of creativity would specify interacting cognitive, neural, and social mechanisms that produce creative acts.

Phil/Psych 447

Paul Thagard

Computational Epistemology Laboratory.

This page updated Sept. 19, 2011