Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Journals
  3. Behavioral and Brain Sciences
  4. Volume 17
Journal Home
Refine listing

Refine listing

Access:
Publication date:

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×
< Back to all volumes

Volume 17 - December 1994

Contents

Page 14 of 21

Open Peer Commentary

Authors' Response

Open Peer Commentary

Article Commentary

Open Peer Commentary

Target Article

  • Précis of The creative mind: Myths and mechanisms

  • Margaret A. Boden
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 February 2010, pp. 519-531

  • 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 (positively valued) 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 to the particular conceptual space concerned – could not have been generated before. (They are made possible by some transformation of the space.) The more clearly conceptual spaces can be defined, the better we can identify creative ideas. Defining conceptual spaces is done by musicologists, literary critics, and historians of art and science. Humanist studies, rich in intuitive subtleties, can be complemented by the comparative rigour of a computational approach. Computational modelling can help to define a space, and to show how it may be mapped, explored, and transformed. Impossibilist creativity can be thought of in “classical” Al terms, whereas connectionism illuminates improbabilist creativity. Most Al models of creativity can only explore spaces, not transform them, because they have no self-reflexive maps enabling them to change their own rules. A few, however, can do so. A scientific understanding of creativity does not destroy our wonder at it, nor does it make creative ideas predictable. Demystification does not imply dehumanization.

Article Commentary

Open Peer Commentary

Article Commentary

Open Peer Commentary

Article Commentary

Open Peer Commentary

Article Commentary

Open Peer Commentary

Page 14 of 21