Creativity and philosophy 9781138827677, 1138827673, 9781138827684, 1138827681

Table of contents :
Creativity, imagination and intellectual virtue / Robert Audi --
Intellectual creativity / Jason Baehr --
Creativity and knowledge / Katherine Hawley --
Creativity, vanity and narcissism / Matthew Kieran --
Creativity without value / Alison Hills, Alexander Bird --
Explicating 'creativity' / Paisley Livingston --
The value of creativity / Berys Gaut --
The active and passive life of creativity : an essay in a Platonic key / Charles Taliaferro, Meredith Varie --
Artistic creativity and suffering / Jennifer Hawkins --
Creativity and biology / Margaret A. Boden --
Attributing creativity / Elliot Samuel Paul, Dustin Stokes --
Explaining creativity / Maria Kronfeldner --
Talking about more than heads : the embodied, embedded and extended creative mind / Michael Wheeler --
The social conditions for sustainable technological innovation / Stephen Davies --
Conceptual creativity in philosophy and logic /M ichael Beaney --
Creating heuristics for philosophical creativity / Alan Hájek --
T he art of doing mathematics / Christían Helmut Wenzel --
Creativity as an artistic merit / James Grant --
Moral imaginativeness, moral creativity and possible futures / Tim Mulgan --
Political creativity : a skeptical view / Matthew Noah Smith.

Citation preview

Creativity and Philosophy

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. Berys Gaut is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, UK. Matthew Kieran is Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at the University of Leeds, UK.

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Creativity and Philosophy

Edited by Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gaut, Berys Nigel, editor. Title: Creativity and philosophy / edited by Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York: Routledge, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017043027 | ISBN 9781138827677 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138827684 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781351199797 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Creative ability. | Philosophy. Classification: LCC B105.C74 C76 2018 | DDC 128/.3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043027 ISBN: 978-1-138-82767-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-82768-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-19979-7 (ebk) Typeset in Garamond and Gillsans by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

Notes on contributors 1 Philosophising about creativity Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran

viii 1

PART I

Creativity as a virtue

23

2 Creativity, imagination and intellectual virtue Robert Audi

25

3 Intellectual creativity Jason Baehr

42

4 Creativity and knowledge Katherine Hawley

60

5 Creativity, vanity and narcissism Matthew Kieran

74

PART II

Creativity and value

93

6 Creativity without value Alison Hills and Alexander Bird

95

7 Explicating ‘creativity’ Paisley Livingston

108

8 The value of creativity Berys Gaut

124

vi Contents   9 The active and passive life of creativity: an essay in a Platonic key Charles Taliaferro and Meredith Varie 10 Artistic creativity and suffering Jennifer Hawkins

140

152

PART III

Creativity and agency

171

11 Creativity and biology Margaret A. Boden

173

12 Attributing creativity Elliot Samuel Paul and Dustin Stokes

193

PART IV

Explaining creativity

211

13 Explaining creativity Maria Kronfeldner

213

14 Talking about more than heads: the embodied, embedded and extended creative mind Michael Wheeler

230

15 The social conditions for sustainable technological innovation Stephen Davies

251

PART V

Creativity in philosophy and mathematics

271

16 Conceptual creativity in philosophy and logic Michael Beaney

273

17 Creating heuristics for philosophical creativity Alan Hájek

292

Contents  18 The art of doing mathematics Christian Helmut Wenzel

vii 313

PART VI

Creativity in art, morality and politics

331

19 Creativity as an artistic merit James Grant

333

20 Moral imaginativeness, moral creativity and possible futures Tim Mulgan

350

21 Political creativity: a skeptical view Matthew Noah Smith

369

Index

391

Contributors

Robert Audi writes, teaches, and lectures in moral and political ­philosophy, epistemology, action theory, and philosophy of religion. His books include The Architecture of Reason (OUP, 2001), The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (Princeton, 2004), Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision (Routledge, 2006), and Moral Perception (Princeton 2013). He is a past president of the American Philosophical Association and currently John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Jason Baehr is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He has written extensively in the area of virtue epistemology. He is author of The Inquiring Mind (Oxford, 2011) and editor of Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology (Routledge, 2016). Michael Beaney is Professor of the History of Analytic Philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin and Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. He is the author of  Frege: Making Sense (1996), Imagination and Creativity (2005), and Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2017), and edits the British Journal for the History of Philosophy. Alexander Bird is Peter Sowerby Professor of Philosophy and Medicine at the King’s College London. His research is in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science and medicine. Among other things, he is currently interested in the relationship between the generation and the evaluation of scientific theories. Margaret A. Boden OBE ScD FBA is Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, where she helped develop the world’s first academic programme in AI and cognitive science. She holds degrees in medical sciences, philosophy, and psychology (as well as a Cambridge ScD, Biology), and integrates these disciplines in her research. Stephen Davies teaches at the University of Auckland. His books include The Philosophy of Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, second edition), The Artful

Contributors  ix Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution (OUP, 2012), Musical Understandings (OUP, 2011), and Philosophical Perspectives on Art (OUP, 2007). Berys Gaut is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Art, Emotion and Ethics (OUP, 2007) and A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (CUP, 2010), as well as numerous articles on creativity, aesthetics, the philosophy of film and ethics. He is co-editor of The Creation of Art (CUP, 2003) and is currently writing a monograph on the philosophy of creativity. James Grant is the William Kneale and Le Rossignol-Clarendon Fellow in Philosophy at Exeter College, University of Oxford. His first book, The Critical Imagination (OUP, 2013), is a study of the role of imaginativeness in art criticism. His current work focuses on value in art. Alan Hájek received his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University. He has been Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University since 2005. His research interests include the philosophical foundations of probability and decision theory, formal epistemology, philosophical logic, and philosophical methodology.  Jennifer Hawkins is Associate Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy and a Faculty Affiliate of the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and History of Medicine, at Duke University. She is currently working on a book about well-being. Katherine Hawley is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. She has previously written on knowing how, on trust, and on topics in metaphysics; her Trust: A Very Short Introduction was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. Alison Hills is Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and Fellow of St John’s College. Her recent research has focused on the intersection between ethics and epistemology. Her book, The Beloved Self, was published by OUP in 2010. Matthew Kieran is Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at the University of Leeds. His publications include Revealing Art (Routledge, 2005), translated into Chinese and Korean, and co-edited collections such as Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind (OUP, 2014). He regularly speaks at conferences and public events. He is currently writing a book on creativity and character. Maria Kronfeldner is Associate Professor at the Central European University, Budapest. She works primarily in the philosophy of the life

x Contributors and social sciences, with a focus on human nature, culture, nature–nurture, creativity, explanation, complexity, normalcy and essentialism. Paisley Livingston is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Lingnan University and Visiting Professor at Uppsala University. He is currently working on a book about the ­aesthetics of Bernard Bolzano. Tim Mulgan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland, and Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. His most recent books are Ethics for a Broken World (Acumen, 2011) and Purpose in the Universe (OUP, 2015). Elliot Samuel Paul is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College, Columbia University. He works mainly in early modern philosophy and epistemology, and is co-editor of  The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays (Oxford University Press, 2014). Matthew Noah Smith is Associate Professor of Philosophy at North­ eastern University. Smith, whose work is broadly interdisciplinary, specializes in the intersection of philosophy of action and political theory. He is currently working on a novel approach to theorizing the materiality of human agency. Dustin Stokes is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. He works primarily in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, with emphasis on cognitive architecture, sensory perception, imagination, and creativity. Charles Taliaferro is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Depart­ ment of Philosophy, St. Olaf College, Minnesota. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, including The Image in Mind: Theism, Naturalism, and the Imagination (Continuum, 2011), co-authored with Jil Evans. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Open Theology. Meredith Varie is a graduate of St. Olaf College, Minnesota. She co-authored two chapters on the philosophy of aging with Charles ­ Taliaferro and has researched palliative care in Costa Rica. She has longterm interests in bioethics and ancient philosophy, and currently works as a healthcare consultant in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Christian Helmut Wenzel holds a PhD in mathematics (algebraic geometry) and a PhD in philosophy (Kant’s aesthetics). He is Distinguished Professor at National Taiwan University and works on Kant, Wittgenstein,

Contributors  xi phenomenology, philosophy of language, Chinese philosophy, and currently on free will. Michael Wheeler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. His research interests are in philosophy of science (especially psychology, biology, and AI) and philosophy of mind, and more specifically in embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive approaches to cognition.

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1

Philosophising 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.

1 The background 1.1  Philosophy and creativity Why should we be interested in creativity from a philosophical point of view?

2  Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran 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,

Philosophising about creativity  3 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

4  Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran 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

Philosophising about creativity  5 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

6  Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran 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 creativity (though see Scruton 2009). A person might methodically imagine each possible option in a Sudoku puzzle square, evaluate each one in turn and then opt for an answer. It might even be that, as Kant held, the imagination is involved in the most basic acts of perception. Hence, it looks like the imagination must be involved in some kind of constructive process in order to be creative. What kind of process might that be? Imagination as an active, productive faculty is geared toward entertaining possibilities or alternative appearances. As such, imagination, unlike mechanisms straightforwardly geared toward belief and knowledge, is not tied to attempting to track how the world is. Hence, in entertaining what is or might be possible, how things could appear, or even the seemingly impossible, imagining something is variously freed from the constraints of belief. Indeed, one line of thought traceable through Freud all the way back to Plato considers the creative imagination to be driven by irrational or non-rational processes. In Plato’s Ion (2005), for example, imaginative inspiration is taken to be a non-voluntary, irrational state driven by divine prompting—whereas for Freud (1995) it was driven by the unconscious. Alternatively, the imagination has been brought together within a more rationalist framework to underwrite distinct claims such as the thought that imagination a) makes the connections between disparate domains required for creativity (Beaney 2005: 193–213); b) has the key features of cognitive manipulation typical of all creative cognitive processes (Stokes 2014); c) is the mental faculty constitutively best suited to be the vehicle for active creativity (Gaut 2003); and d) is the common ground of both pretence and creativity (Picciuto and Carruthers 2014, 2016). 1.5 Virtue Much philosophical literature is concerned with creative acts and processes, yet there is a further question concerning what it is to be a creative person. One approach that has come to the fore recently, as might be expected given its resurgence in ethics (Hursthouse and Pettigrove 2016) and epistemology (Turri, Alfano and Greco 2017), is the virtue theoretic tradition. In one sense, the issue can seem straightforward: a creative person performs creative acts. But does someone count as creative if she has only ever performed one creative act? This seems too weak given that creative

Philosophising about creativity  7 acts can be out of character. How about the idea that creative persons continually perform creative acts? This might seem too strong, given the recognition that creative people can fail to manifest relevant dispositions. Hence, the attraction of the idea that creativity must be a disposition of persons to perform creative acts. It is not just that the person possesses certain capacities such as the ability to imagine. Rather, the creative person is disposed to exercise mechanisms and abilities in ways which lead to creative acts (Gaut 2014). Now, some people within the virtue theoretic tradition take creativity to be a virtue or an achievement constituted by virtues in a stronger sense than this (see, for example, Zagzebski 1996: 123–125, 167; Woodruff 2001: 28; Swanton 2003: 161–178, Kieran 2014a and b). What is meant by virtue here? Zagzebski, for one, takes epistemic virtues generally to be admirable, well-motivated traits that reliably dispose toward the acquisition of knowledge. Swanton holds that virtues are good qualities of character that dispose toward acknowledging and reacting to features in good ways thereby tracking what is independently valuable. While some hold that the possession and exercise of virtues tend to lead to a flourishing life (Zagzebski 1996; Aristotle 2004 bk. 1 ch. 7 10–13 and bk. 10 ch. 6 193–194), others hold that the link between creative virtue and well-being may be more attenuated (Swanton 2003; Kieran 2014b). Controversy also arises in relation to the role of motivation. People can be creative and yet badly motivated in all sorts of ways. If that is right, then, as some have argued (Gaut 2014), perhaps creativity cannot be or involve virtue in the fullest sense. Alternatively, this might show that only some virtues, such as curiosity, are partly constitutive of creativity (Kieran 2014b) and we should be careful to distinguish being creative from exemplary creativity (Kieran 2014a). 1.6  Luck and goals One thing that often plays a role in creativity is luck. Knowledge, abilities and virtues might be taken to make success more reliable (Zagzebski 1996, Kieran 2014a) or, more minimally, praise should track virtuous, warranted exercise of abilities rather than mere accident or luck (Baehr 2007). Yet if we think about creativity, creative success is not only often very difficult but luck seems to play a much larger role here than elsewhere. How can we square this with the thought that true creative achievement and justified praise should normally rule out lucky success? Or should it? Creative people often seek luck out. If someone is seeking to transform conceptual space or do something a bit differently, then introducing random elements can help. Hence, the practice of automatic writing or Brian Eno’s oblique strategies card set. Indirect disruption strategies, or unlooked-for serendipity, can bring new, otherwise unimagined elements into the creative

8  Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran process, sometimes leading to much better results. It also looks like there might be a tension between reliability and difficulty. We expect truly creative people to be reliably so, yet the more difficult, potentially transformative the work is, the more people work at the edge of their capacities. The more people work at the edge of their capacities, the less reliable they are likely to be. We might even ask, what exactly is it that creative people are working toward? In some cases there is a given puzzle people are trying to solve or an end goal they are striving for. Yet in other cases there seems to be no problem in mind and no goal in sight. A creative person might be idly doodling or playing around, something interesting may start to emerge and then the process takes on a life of its own. This is taken by some to show that creativity by its very nature cannot be goal orientated (Tomas 1958). Even where people start with an end in view, and a sense of the relevant means, the creative process constitutively seems to involve unexpected, unanticipated changes such that the end result can never be fully anticipated until the process itself is complete (Collingwood 1938: 111; Beardsley 1965). By contrast, even if this is necessarily so for certain work types, goal orientated constraints often seem to play constitutive roles in determining deliberations during the creative process (Livingston 2009; Elster 2000; Levinson 2003). 1.7  Similarities and differences We have been talking so far about creativity in a rather abstracted, general sense. Yet there might be many crucial differences across specific groups and domains. Just to give an idea of the range of issues that are relevant here, we might focus on high-end eminent creativity (Simonton 2004) or lower-level ordinary creativity (Sawyer 2012: 389–438)—Big-C creativity or little-c creativity as some psychologists term them (Kozbelt, Beghetto and Runco 2010: 23)—or wonder how they are related (Weisberg 1993). We might also want to consider relevant similarities and differences across cultures (Lubart 2010) and species (Reader, Flynn, Morand-Ferron and Laland 2016). With regard to domains, what we take the similarities or differences to be may depend on the relevant background metaphysics. Platonists, for example, tend to think about creativity in terms of the discovery of universals or types across domains. Against this backdrop, artistic creativity looks very much like scientific creativity (Dodd 2007). By contrast, Kant holds that genius is found in artists alone because artistic creativity is radically constructive in a way that scientific discovery can never be. The genius creates an exemplar for others to follow even though there are no underlying principles which could explain how this was created. A scientist, by contrast, follows general principles in applying

Philosophising about creativity  9 theoretical concepts to arrive at a discovery (Kant 2000: 186–197). On the other hand, Kuhn’s (1970) account of revolutionary science makes it look less like science as it is characterised by Kant, and more like his characterisation of artistic creativity. Given the variety of metaphysical approaches, we might expect many different ways of carving up the similarities and differences in creativity across domains. The nature of domain values also seems relevant. In morality, consistency and universality are at a premium, so moral creativity might often be concerned with shifts in seeing how principles apply or creating newer, better, fairer institutions. By contrast, individuality in art may be to the fore so artistic creativity might zero in on qualities such as uniqueness of style or expression. Alternatively, assumptions about domain differences may reflect conventional wisdom, rather than revealing anything deeper about creativity in the domains in question.

2 The volume With the background sketched, we now turn to the chapters in the volume. They are arranged into six parts, concerning creativity as a virtue; creativity and value; creativity and agency; explaining creativity; creativity in philosophy and mathematics; and creativity in art, morality and politics. Though we believe that this is a reasonable classification, we could have placed many of the chapters in different parts, since most chapters address issues relevant to more than one part. And there are some themes in several chapters, such as the relation of imagination to creativity, that are not reflected in the titles of any part. So, in summarising each chapter, we will bring out some of the themes in chapters that are not apparent from the part headings, and describe the chapters in a way that enables the reader to see some of the less overt connections between them. 2.1  Creativity as a virtue The first part consists in four chapters, all of which are broadly supportive of the claim that creativity is, or can under some circumstances be, a virtue. Robert Audi’s wide-ranging chapter argues that imagination is the chief, though not only, constituent of creativity, and characterises imagination as being largely the capacity to produce new things. Both imaginativeness and creativity can be temporary or a feature of character, and when a feature of character, they may be virtues. When they are virtues, they are characteristically mixed, having both an intellectual and practical aspect. As virtues they are also constituents of the human good, though creative products are not necessarily valuable. Creativity and imaginativeness can be exercised in many domains, including the moral one, and in Aristotle’s, Kant’s and Mill’s ethical theories imagination should play a role if the theories

10  Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran are to be applied correctly. Audi also discusses the relation of ­creativity to ­predictability, distinguishing two sorts of the latter; he suggests that imagination may be teachable, though there is no formula to do so; and he rejects the view that surprise is part of the definition of creativity. Jason Baehr notes that virtue epistemology has shown little interest in creativity, and this ought to be redressed, since intellectual creativity (creativity within the epistemic realm) is plausibly regarded as an intellectual virtue, on a par with virtues such as curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual courage and intellectual humility. He identifies four dimensions of intellectual virtues: they involve characteristic skills or abilities; they are grounded in love of epistemic goods such as truth, knowledge or understanding; they involve the taking of pleasure in their exercise; and good judgement is involved in knowing when to exercise the constituent skill. He then identifies eight putative features of creativity simpliciter: it has a generative aspect; its products are new or unexpected; they instantiate values proper to the activity in question; creativity involves the imagination (understood as the capacity to identify new or unexpected possibilities); it involves a unique kind of perception; it is related to insight; it operates in a muse-like fashion; and creative persons find creative activity intrinsically rewarding. Baehr proceeds to develop an account of intellectual creativity that accounts for these eight features and conforms to the four-dimensional structural model of intellectual virtues. In the course of his account, he also argues that there are reasons to believe that creativity can be taught. Katherine Hawley argues that the philosophy of creativity can learn much from considering issues in epistemology, and doing so illuminates issues about creative value and creativity as a virtue. Some philosophers believe that creative products must be valuable in some respect, and others deny this claim. Hawley holds that creative products have to possess creative value, but that the value concerned might depend only on the fact that novel features are conferred by an agential process, specifically, one that involves the creditable exercise of certain virtues; the creative product might otherwise be lacking in value. So her account of creative value supports the claim that creativity is a virtue. In parallel fashion, the virtue epistemologist explains why knowledge is more valuable than true belief by holding that knowledge is true belief that issues from a creditable exercise of the intellectual virtues. Hawley then employs her account to explain how even failures can be creative, since they may have creative value, in being the production of novel things that are creditable exercises of certain virtues, even though they lack other values. She also argues that injustice in underestimating someone’s creative abilities parallels cases of epistemic injustice about testimony. Matthew Kieran addresses a challenge to virtue theories of creativity. Vanity is a vice, but it seems it may promote creative achievement. If

Philosophising about creativity  11 this is so, some personal vices are creative virtues. Kieran characterises a core component of vanity as being a desire for self-glorification, where an implied audience, actual or idealised, does the glorifying. Vanity may promote creative achievement because the vain person aims to garner the esteem of this implied audience by setting high targets, working at the edge of her creative capacities, taking more risks, persevering and developing greater discrimination about what the audience esteems as creative. But the features of vanity that promote creativity are fundamentally outweighed by those that undercut it. Vanity tends to lead to creative alienation in undermining collaborations, which are widespread in creative activities; it also leads to creative imprudence in generating creative overreach, blindness to certain risks and to tracking what the implied audience finds fashionable rather than what is truly creative. So vanity is a creative vice. But of all the creative vices, it may be the closest to being a creative virtue, since a vain person can be educated to respond not to actual praise, but to merited praise and ultimately to performing creative acts because they are worth pursuing as ends. 2.2  Creativity and value The second part of the volume discusses the relationship between creativity and value from a variety of sometimes opposing perspectives. Alison Hills and Alexander Bird reject the standard view that creativity requires the production of valuable objects. The creative disposition may produce objects that completely lack objective value, attributive value (a thing being valuable of its kind) and value, either subjective or objective, to the creative person. It is also possible to recognise items as creative without making any judgement about their value. Moreover, the standard view has to embrace the psychologically unrealistic claim that there are two distinct dispositions in some creative people: one involving the production of valuable items, and a second, otherwise similar one, involving the production of items that have negative value or are worthless. Hills and Bird conclude by discussing the ‘original nonsense’ argument, often attributed to Kant, which holds that genius must involve exemplarity as well as originality, since otherwise someone could be a genius by virtue of producing original nonsense. They question whether the argument is to be found in Kant, and also maintain that the argument, cast in terms of creativity, is unsound. Paisley Livingston argues that a creative action is one that manifests originality as an effective means to some end. Since the means must be effective (successful), creative actions involve instrumental value; however, no stronger value requirement is involved, since the ends need not be intrinsically good, and may be indifferent, or even bad, as shown by the possibility of creative torture. In arguing for the possibility of immoral

12  Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran creativity, Livingston criticises some of David Novitz’s arguments against that ­possibility, as well as virtue accounts of creativity that endorse a strong doctrine of the unity of the virtues. He also argues that apparent cases of creative failures do not undermine the success condition of his account. He also discusses Robert Merton’s notion of originality, which allows for the possibility of two people being original in independently coming up with the same innovation. This contrasts with the stronger notion of priority, which is exhibited by only the first person to come up with the innovation, a contrast that anticipates Boden’s distinction between psychological and historical creativity. Berys Gaut defends an account of the value of creativity based on an agency theory of creativity. He argues that creativity is an agential disposition, involving the exercise of relevant reasons-sensitivity and appropriate knowledge-how, to produce new things that are valuable of their kind. Since not all kinds, such as terrorism and torture, are valuable, not all exercises of creativity are valuable: so creativity is only a conditional value, that is, valuable only under some circumstances. When the conditions of its being valuable are met, creativity also has final and instrumental value. The agential nature of creativity also provides part of the explanation of the value of creativity: by exercising their agential powers, agents can more rapidly and efficiently produce new things that are valuable of their kind than can non-agents; and there is a necessary connection between creativity and spontaneity, including improvisation, in the sense that a creative action cannot be precisely planned in advance. Charles Taliaferro and Meredith Varie discuss creativity as a valuable trait. Drawing on Coleridge, they hold that the creative person exercises her imagination, as opposed to fancy or fantasy; in doing so she overcomes the obstacles to creation, showing herself to be passionate, driven and willing to struggle; therein consists the value of creativity. They also argue for a Platonic metaphysics of artworks, according to which all possible works pre-exist as states of affairs, and the role of the artist consists in making some of these states of affairs obtain. This might appear to reduce the creative act to one of making discoveries and so to devalue it, but they argue that it does not: the struggle of the creator still has an important role on this view, in making obtain some states of affairs, whilst the alternative idea of creation ex nihilo, as instanced in one view of God’s act of creation, is close to incoherent. Jennifer Hawkins addresses the prudential value of creativity in relation to that of suffering. There is psychological evidence that for some artists suffering may be a necessary condition for their creative achievements. If that evidence is not misleading, would the prudential value of creativity (the fact that it is good for the artist) sometimes outweigh the prudential disvalue of suffering? Hawkins gives reasons to doubt that this

Philosophising about creativity  13 is so. She notes that hindsight bias is often displayed in people’s narratives of ­suffering and achievement, and that we lack a sufficiently rich vocabulary to describe negative affective states. She introduces the notion of a personal perspective, which underlies and explains more transient moods and emotions. The enduring negativity of a personal perspective is more significant than that of transient states. When this negativity is intense (amounting to suffering), it is unlikely that, from a prudential perspective, it could be outweighed by the value of creativity. Thus, it is only rarely, if ever, that it is worth suffering for the sake of creative achievement, though it may be worth enduring milder negative states. In the course of her argument, Hawkins also distinguishes some possible mechanisms by which negative affective states may promote artistic creativity and locates her view within dual process theories of the mind. 2.3  Creativity and agency The third part examines the relation of creativity to agency. Margaret Boden has in the past influentially defined creativity as the ability to generate ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable. In her contribution to this volume, she argues for broadening this definition by substituting ‘forms’ for ‘ideas or artefacts’, thus allowing application of the notion of creativity to biology, and not only to agents with psychologies. So, on this broader conception, there is no necessary link between agency and creativity. In place of the notion of P-creativity (psychological creativity) she substitutes the broader notion of I-creativity (individual creativity), where the latter denotes the first time that a new feature occurs in the life of an individual entity, thus including biological entities as well as psychological agents. She argues that the broadened concept does useful work in biology: for instance, H-creativity (historical creativity) is manifested in phylogenetic changes, explained by evolutionary theory; and I-creativity in ontogenetic changes, the subject of developmental biology. Biological changes can be new, often awesomely so, and valuable, and they exhibit the same three types of surprise—grounded on combinational, exploratory or transformational mechanisms—as do psychological changes. Biological I-creativity is captured by the notion of self-organisation, which, despite its appearance of near-paradox, can be given a coherent definition. She also discusses some of the mechanisms involved in self-organisation in cybernetics and neuroscience, as well as in developmental biology. Elliot Paul and Dustin Stokes note that the near-consensus definition of creativity in psychology focuses on products, rather than on persons or processes, and defines a creative product as one that is new and valuable. This definition, they argue, is incomplete, since a creative product must also be the outcome of the right kind of process. Having considered

14  Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran some proposals for what kind of process this is, they favour the view that it is one that non-trivially and essentially involves agency. They offer three arguments for this process requirement, and its agency version in particular. An argument from justificatory practice notes that when people justify their attributions of creativity to some product, they give reasons that appeal to the agentive processes that produced the product. An argument from linguistic practice notes the incoherence of the attribution of creativity to entities that are not the products of agency, such as sunsets. And a modal argument holds that in possible worlds in which objects spontaneously appear without any process, or where the processes that produce them do not involve intentional agency, the objects in these worlds are not creative. From these conceptual or metaphysical claims, two epistemological or psychological implications follow: competent judgements about some object’s being creative do not support a pure product view of creativity, and such judgements implicitly refer to a generative process that non-trivially involves agency—judging that some object is creative is elliptical for judging that it is the result of some creative process. 2.4  Explaining creativity The fourth part of the volume addresses the questions of whether it is possible to explain creativity, and, if so, what kinds of explanations are most promising. Maria Kronfeldner criticises the claim that creativity is inexplicable from a naturalistic point of view. A prominent argument for this view is based on equating creativity with metaphysical (libertarian) freedom, which presupposes the falsity of determinism. Kronfeldner holds that this argument leads to a dilemma: if naturalism is true, no one is creative, but if naturalism is false, everyone is creative. Instead, she argues that creativity consists in originality and spontaneity, which require only partial independence from specific causal factors: from the influence of an original, and from the influence of the creative person’s previously acquired knowledge, respectively. She then argues against the Darwinian explanation of creativity, holding that either it confuses a descriptive feature of creativity (that the creative person does not have complete foresight about what she will creatively produce) with an explanatory claim, or, in another variant, that it posits an unconscious chance-configuration mechanism that is hard to test and for which there is evidence to the contrary. She concludes that the most promising explanations of creativity appeal only to a set of ordinary cognitive processes, perhaps operating in confluence and in complex ways. Michael Wheeler distinguishes three types of explanation of creative activity. The Romantic view of creativity exhibits an inside-to-outside logic of explanation, where the work is essentially complete in the artist’s

Philosophising about creativity  15 head, and is then expressed in outer form. Explanations with an outsideto-inside logic are exemplified by the musician David Byrne’s account of creativity, according to which creative activity adapts itself to pre-existing technological, social and physical formats. Wheeler argues that these two kinds of explanation are at best incomplete. Instead, creativity exhibits an inside-and-outside logic: creative activity involves a kind of interactive partnership between inner and outer resources. This third kind of explanation is realised in theories of creative cognition as embodied, embedded and extended. The creative mind is embodied (often shaped, in fundamental ways, by non-neural bodily factors), embedded (often causally dependent, in subtle and surprising ways, on the bodily exploitation of environmental props or scaffolds) and extended (elements located beyond the skull and skin sometimes count as constituent parts of the creative mind). In arguing his case, Wheeler employs thought-experiments of brain transplants of creative performers, discusses computer-assisted art, computer-based generative art and evolutionary computer art, the role of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre in shaping Wagner’s music (a case of cognitive niche construction), and David Byrne’s and Brian Eno’s song-writing practices. Stephen Davies addresses the question of what explains creative achievements by focusing on technological developments in the Stone Age. Striking technological and other innovations in Upper Palaeolithic Europe have led some scholars to believe that there must have been a fundamental cognitive change in the workings of the brain at about this time. But Davies notes that there were precursors of many of these technologies in Middle Stone Age Africa, notably in the Cape region of South Africa, which predated the European innovations by many millennia, and which disappeared many millennia before the technologies were reinvented in Europe. Innovations in both areas and eras are to be explained by environmental and population changes, Davies argues. Environmental changes, due to rapid climate change or to humans’ migration to a wide variety of environments, encouraged technological creativity as a response to new environmental challenges. Increases in population size, density, and inter-group contact and trade also stimulated creativity, and crucially preserved those innovations that were created: in the absence of large and dense populations innovations were repeatedly lost, including in Tasmania from 14,000 years ago onwards. So in the cases under consideration environmental and demographic factors are crucial components in explaining creative activities. 2.5  Creativity in philosophy and mathematics The last two parts of the volume deal with creativity in individual domains. The fifth part concerns creativity in philosophy, logic and mathematics.

16  Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran Michael Beaney discusses conceptual creativity in philosophy and logic. Creativity is an under-recognised feature of analytic philosophy. Each of the three kinds of philosophical analysis that Beaney distinguishes— decompositional, regressive and interpretive—can be creative, partly because of the role of imagination in them. And they can each exhibit conceptual creativity, of which there are four kinds. Creativity in forming new concepts is exemplified by Cantor’s creation of the concept of transfinite numbers. Creativity in modifying concepts is illustrated by Frege’s construal of concepts as functions. Creativity in finding new applications of concepts is instanced by Russell’s employment of Frege’s interpretive analysis in his theory of descriptions. And creativity in forming new conceptual frameworks is exemplified by Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy. Though Kant’s revolution illustrates the forming of a new conceptual framework most strikingly, Beaney argues that the other three examples also exemplify this kind of creativity. He also relates his account to Boden’s discussion of three kinds of creativity: the production of new conceptual frameworks is her transformational creativity, and his four case studies are also instances of exploratory creativity; there is a lesser role for what she terms combinational creativity. Beaney concludes by discussing the prospects of using Boden’s computationally derived distinctions to help explain creativity, and notes that the idea of a generative system has clear applications in at least three of his examples, though historical investigations are also required if we are to explain creativity satisfactorily. Alan Hájek continues the discussion of creativity in philosophy, arguing that in philosophy, as in many domains, there are heuristics that enhance creativity. Heuristics are, roughly, rules of thumb that promote problem solving. Their effectiveness shows that philosophical creativity is not purely innate, though their use requires philosophical wisdom in judging when and how to use them, as well as a degree of native cunning. Each stage of philosophical enquiry—whether generative, evaluative or refinement—can be enhanced by heuristics. Hájek describes six heuristics in detail, illustrating their use with examples. The fridge word heuristic consists in searching for philosophical keywords in the problem domain, and combining them in various ways to see if they suggest any problems or hypotheses. The use of constraints, in imposing a set of desiderata on one’s theorising, may also spark creativity. Taxonomising and colonising consists in drawing up a table of distinctions in the relevant domain and seeing whether any spaces are unoccupied by existing views. The use of contrastive stress encourages philosophers to examine the contrast class of the keywords in a problem or thesis, as does the use of the related ‘turn the knobs’ heuristic to consider all the values of the variables in a problem. Finally, analogical reasoning is a powerful tool to both generate and evaluate philosophical positions.

Philosophising about creativity  17 Christian Wenzel argues that the degree of creativity in mathematics has often been underestimated, particularly by Kant, for whom genius is restricted exclusively to fine art. This misconception is rooted in focusing on the results of mathematics, rather than on the process of doing mathematics. Doing mathematics is similar in crucial respects to the making of art, for the mathematician moves freely and playfully in creating mathematics. In contrast, Kant’s view is that in mathematics and science there is a single natural path of inquiry and reflection according to rules. Wenzel argues that this view massively understates the freedom of the mathematician: mathematicians can choose their axioms, there are many proofs that can be given for any theorem, there are an infinite number of propositions that validly follow from each step of a proof, and there are no rules for the application of rules. There is a further connection between art and mathematics, since the mathematician makes tacit judgements of taste in selecting which way to proceed in forming proofs and theories. So, ironically, Kant’s aesthetics is a better guide to mathematical creation than are his comments on mathematics. However, since mathematicians must avoid contradictions, their freedom is not quite as unconstrained as that of artists. Wenzel also discusses the role of the unconscious and imagination in mathematical creativity, and how the development of multiple disciplines in mathematics creates affordances that open up new possibilities for creativity. 2.6  Creativity in art, morality and politics The final part of the volume discusses creativity in art, morality and politics. James Grant argues that creativity (his preferred term is ‘imaginativeness’) is an artistic merit. Creativity involves thinking of something that was not an obvious thing to think of, and which it was plausible to believe would have a reasonable chance of success (the latter condition allows for the possibility of creative failures). Creativity is an artistic merit in the sense that it helps to make artworks good of their kind, but this is not true of many other things: creative explanations are not better explanations in virtue of being creative. Grant develops the excellence theory of artistic merit to explain this difference between artworks and many other things. The theory holds, first, that manifesting or being an excellence in realising some other artistic merit can be a (higher-order) artistic merit: for instance, exhibiting courage, intelligence or skill in realising artistic merit is an artistic merit. Second, the reason why these higher-order merits are artistic merits is that excellences have final, not merely instrumental, value. Creativity is one of these higher-order merits with final value. Grant applies the theory to argue that philosophers who have denied that creativity is an artistic merit are mistaken. Tim Mulgan argues that we need moral creativity in the face of credible futures involving broken worlds (where environmental catastrophe has led to resources inadequate to satisfy everyone’s basic needs), virtual

18  Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran reality worlds and digital worlds (involving AI or brain uploads to computers). Just as Plenty Coups, the Crow chief, had to reimagine the nature of courage in light of the loss of his tribe’s hunting grounds, so do we have to reimagine our ethics, with its assumption that the conditions of affluence will continue indefinitely. Given the nature of the threats, we need H-original thinking (in Boden’s sense) to address them. Mulgan distinguishes something being imaginative (new, surprising and valuable) from its being creative (which requires the implementation of the imaginative item). Moral imaginativeness is also different from imaginative thinking about morality, as illustrated by moral philosophy and moral fiction, which may exhibit the latter but not the former. Moral creativity is a collective achievement, partly because morality requires second-person justification and creativity requires social implementation. Future people will need to be more morally creative than we are, given the variety of possible challenges facing them, and their creativity undermines any attempt to predict the future. The volume concludes with Matthew Noah Smith’s discussion of political creativity. The well-supported standard model of creativity holds that creativity is a capacity of an individual agent, manifested in intentional action that intellectually engages with a practice, and which produces something new and valuable. But political phenomena, in contrast to moral ones, are structural, social and systemic, and so the political does not fit the individualist model of creativity. Though there are several prominent philosophical theories of group agency and collective intentionality, which might seem to provide the basis for a model of group creativity, these theories apply at best to smallscale groups, where conditions of mutual responsiveness and common knowledge most readily obtain. Applying these theories to political institutions, which are typically massive and often incorporate essentially contested concepts, is problematic. Moreover, for creative processes to exist, a rich mental life is required, and ascribing the requisite range of mental states to group agents is especially problematic. Smith concludes that we have reason to be sceptical about the existence of political creativity, and even the coherence of its concept. The chapters in the volume thus cover many of the central issues in the philosophy of creativity, and tackle them from a variety of illuminating perspectives. We believe their publication will materially advance the debate and help to consolidate and advance the emerging field of the philosophy of creativity.1

Note 1 We would like to thank the contributors to our volume, and Mike Beaney in particular, for their feedback on this chapter.

Philosophising about creativity  19

References Aristotle (2004 [367–322 bc]) Nicomachean Ethics, R. Crisp (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baehr, J. (2007) “On the Reliability of Moral and Intellectual Virtues,” Meta­ philosophy 38: 457–471. Bailes, F. and L. Bishop (2012) “Musical Imagery in the Creative Process,” in D. Collins (ed.) The Act of Musical Composition, London: Routledge. Beaney, M. (2005) Imagination and Creativity, Milton Keynes: Open University. Beardsley, M. (1965) “On the Creation of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23: 291–304. Boden, M. (2004) The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2nd ed., London: Routledge. Chavez, R. A. (2016) “Imagery as a Core Process in the Creativity of Successful and Awarded Artists and Scientists and Its Neurobiological Correlates,” Frontiers in Psychology: Cognition, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00351 Collingwood, R. G. (1938) The Principles of Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Currie, G. (2000) “Imagination, Delusion and Hallucinations,” Mind and Language 15: 168–183. Dennett, D. (1995) Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, London: Penguin. Dodd, J. (2007) Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elster, J. (2000) Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Pre-Commitment and Constraint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freud, S. (1995[1907]) “Creative Writers and Day Dreaming,” in E. S. Person (ed.), On Freud’s “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gaut, B. (2003) “Creativity and Imagination,” in B. Gaut and P. Livingston (eds.), The Creation of Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gaut, B. (2014) “Mixed Motivations: Creativity as a Virtue,” Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 75: 183–202. Gaut, B. and P. Livingston (2003) The Creation of Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gendler, T. (2016) “Imagination,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/imagination/ Gerrans, P. (2014) The Measure of Madness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grant, J. (2012) “The Value of Imaginativeness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90: 275–89. Hausman, C. A. (1985) “Originality as a Criterion of Creativity,” in M. H. Mitias (ed.), Creativity in Art, Religion and Culture, Amsterdam: Rodopoi. Hursthouse, R. and G. Pettigrove (2016) “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclope­ dia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2016/entries/ethics-virtue/

20  Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran Kant, I. (2000 [1781]) Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kieran, M. (2014a) “Creativity as a Virtue of Character,” in E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity, New York: Oxford University Press. Kieran, M. (2014b) “Creativity, Virtue and the Challenges from Natural Talent, Ill-Being and Immorality,” Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 75: 203–230. Kozbelt, A., R. A. Beghetto and M. A. Runco (2010) “Theories of Creativity,” in J. C. Kaufman and R. J. Sternberg (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krausz, M., D. Dutton and K. Bardsley (2009) The Idea of Creativity, Leiden: Brill. Kuhn, T. (1970 [1962]) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd. ed. with postscript, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lacey, S. and R. Lawson (2013) Multisensory Imagery, New York: Springer. Levinson, J. (2003) “Elster on Artistic Creativity,” in B. Gaut and P. Livingston (eds.), The Creation of Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liao, S., L. McNally and A. Meskin (2016) “Aesthetic Adjectives Lack Uniform Behaviour,” Inquiry 59: 618–631. Livingston, P. (2009) “Poincaré’s Delicate Sieve: On Creativity and Constraints in the Arts,” in M. Krausz, D. Dutton and K. Bardsley (eds.), The Idea of Creativity, Leiden: Brill. Lubart, T. (2010) “Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Creativity,” in J. C. Kaufman and R. J. Sternberg (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 265–278. Novitz, D. (1999) “Creativity and Constraint,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77: 67–82. Paul, E. S. and S. Kaufman (2014) The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, New York: Oxford University Press. Phillips, I. (2014) “Lack of Imagination: Individual Differences in Mental Imagery and the Significance of Consciousness,” in M. Sprevak and J. Kallestrup (eds.), New Waves in Philosophy of Mind, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Picciuto, E. and P. Carruthers (2014) “The Origins of Creativity,” in E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity, New York: Oxford University Press. Picciuto, E. and P. Carruthers (2016) “Imagination and Pretense,” in A. Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, London: Routledge. Plato (2005 [before 390 bc]) “Ion,” in Early Socratic Dialogues, London: Penguin. Reader, S. M., E. Flynn, J. Morand-Ferron and K. N. Laland (2016) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Theme Issue: Innovation in Animals and Humans: Understanding the Origins and Development of Novel and Creative Behaviour, 371. Robinson, K. and L. Aronica (2016) Creative Schools, London: Penguin. Runco, M. (1994) “Creativity,” Annual Review of Psychology 55: 657–87.

Philosophising about creativity  21 Sawyer, R. K. (2012) Explaining Creativity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scruton, R. (2009) “Imagination,” in S. Davies, K. Higgins, R. Hopkins, R. Stecker and D. Cooper (eds.), A Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd ed., Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Simonton, D. K. (2004) Creativity in Science: Chance, Logic, Genius and Zeitgeist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stokes, D. (2011) “Minimally Creative Thought,” Metaphilosophy 42: 658–681. Stokes, D. (2014) “The Role of Creativity in Imagination,” in E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity, New York: Oxford University Press. Swanton, C. (2003) Virtue Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, N. J. T. (2009) “Visual Imagery and Consciousness,” in W. P. Banks (ed.), Encyclopedia of Consciousness, vol. 2, Oxford: Academic Press/Elsevier. Thomas, N. J. T. (2017) “Mental Imagery,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/ mental-imagery/ Tomas, V. (1958) “Creativity in Art,” Philosophical Review 67: 1–15. Turri, J., M. Alfano and J. Greco (2017) “Virtue Epistemology,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/epistemology-virtue/ Weisberg, R. (1993) Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius, 2nd ed., New York: W. H. Freeman and Co. Woodruff, D. M. (2001) “A Virtue Theory of Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 35: 23–36. Wreen, M. (2015) “Creativity,” Philosophia 43: 891–913. Zagzebski, L. T. (1996) Virtues of the Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Part I CREATIVITY AS A VIRTUE

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2

Creativity, imagination and intellectual virtue Robert Audi

Creativity is admired, coveted, and celebrated, but it is not as well ­understood philosophically as its importance might lead one to expect. Whatever it is, imagination lies at its center. That, however, is scarcely less difficult to describe than creativity itself. With both, moreover, there is the question of whether they are best understood conceived as virtues. A related question, commonly raised regarding virtues, is whether they can be taught. These questions are among my general concerns. A more specific focus of the essay is imagination in the moral sphere, but conceptual questions will also be major concerns. One question is how imagination is related to truth. Still another is what special role imagination has in the moral sphere. Does it, for instance, create value? And should creativity play the kind of role that virtue does in a comprehensive understanding of human good?

I The definition problem Creativity is not limited to human beings, but if we can understand it in the human case, then we can see what might constitute creativity both in lower beings, such as chimpanzees, and at higher levels—though the possibility of a perfect being raises special problems.1 Creative people must produce something—at least, if they are at all successful in realizing their creative potential. But, as strong an association as there may be between creativity and productivity, the latter, even given valuable products, is not sufficient for the former. Even if we produce something valuable, we may be merely copying what others have done; even if what we produce is rare, we may be simply imitating our teachers. It would be a mistake, however, to deny imitation any role in creativity as we know it. Many creative people must begin as imitators. Consider apprenticeship as the route on which many creative people have begun their careers. Some people may be imitating even when they are at their most creative. Individuality can transcend the attempt at conformity. For many, imitation is a ladder that leads upward to creativity. Some who must begin their development in this way reach a height at which they may discard the ladder. We should also keep in mind the form of imitation that

26  Robert Audi aestheticians call mimesis; here, the attempt may be both to recreate with a kind of fidelity and to transcend mere copying. Great representational landscape painters can be creative, and their creations are not all photographic. Might the notion of surprise help in understanding creativity?2 Certainly creativity often yields outputs that surprise us. But, although we can hope to be surprised by creative endeavors, people vary greatly in what surprises them. Some are hard to surprise by anything; others expect the unexpected from creative people and, rarely surprised, simply consider the creation in terms of their own interests. Still others know well the genre in which a creative person operates and are unlikely to be surprised by any normal creative contribution within it. There may be a sense in which creativity must yield something unpredictable. Here, we should distinguish internal from external predictability. If determinism—conceived as the view that every event is deducible from some antecedent event in accordance with universal laws of nature— should be true, the entire work of art would presumably be predictable in detail from facts about the artist, the history of the world up to the time of creation of the work, and the laws of nature. This is external predict­ ability. It does not entail any aesthetic deficiency. More important, it does not entail internal predictability, the kind that occurs when, quite apart from whether determinism holds, early in a work such as a novel or symphony (or in any case, too early in a work), an experienced sensitive reader or listener can predict what is reasonably considered “too much” of the rest.3 The overall creative product in such cases should not be internally predictable in detail in any ordinary way.4 If, in reading a sonnet’s first four lines, we could tell exactly what would be the subject, narrative content, sentiments, metaphors, and vocabulary in the remaining lines, it is unlikely that the final product could be fairly thought to exhibit creativity. Perhaps the reason might be that the work would be too close to formulaic, like a pulp mystery novel that, though not plagiarized, one feels one has read before. If a kind of predictability is ruled out, might we say that a creative work must be new? No. Newton and Leibniz are each credited with inventing or (arguably) discovering calculus, but they did not do so at the same moment, so one of them did not produce something “new” in the temporal sense. The same might hold for two people’s independently developing an idea or constructing a style of sculpture or musical composition. What this shows is that creativity as a personal characteristic is, in a sense, relative to the creative person: it entails novelty in relation to what is accessible to the person, but not in relation to the whole of history.5 My examples have been of things that have value, especially aesthetic or intellectual value. Creativity would be less important to us if it did not tend to yield things of value. But it is essential to see that creativity, simply as such, does not require producing something valuable—at least, not lasting

Creativity, imagination, and intellectual virtue  27 value of an interpersonally meaningful kind. A child’s silly stories may exhibit creativity; an artist’s doodling can show it even if no aesthetically sensitive viewer would contemplate the results for their own sake. I stress this because insofar as we can teach creativity at all, we must tolerate its early expressions that may lead nowhere but can be indispensable exercises. This applies particularly to childhood creativity. Even in adults, we must encourage and sometimes even reward apparently fruitless expressions of creativity. Creativity normally has an experimental element; if Shakespeare or Mozart often needed little trial and error, most creative people achieve success only after many failures and some mediocre achievements. Might we think of creativity as a rough equivalent of inventiveness, at least where the former is manifested in inventions having the kind of value required to credit the creator with transcending mere novelty? Even with this restriction, there is the question whether creativity requires outputs (which may or may not be tangible products) having intrinsic value. Inventiveness does not require that: one could be highly inventive in creating means to worthwhile ends even if the means have no intrinsic value. Granted, some things whose value is just instrumental have a complexity or importance that would make it natural to call the inventor creative. The question is whether inventiveness entails creativity even apart from producing things of significant value. This may be a question best answered case-by-case. Inventiveness and creativity seem almost extensionally equivalent, and a person cannot have either one without some degree of the other.6 Creativity as a characteristic of a person has a quantitative dimension as well as a qualitative one. If two people do things, say musical compositions, of equal quality, then if one does significantly more of them, that indicates greater creativity. Moreover, if one of two creative people overcomes more obstacles in creating or shows more potential in the creations up to a given time, these differences are significant. We might call the quantitative variable the productivity dimension. Quality of what is produced is a very different variable. A merely novel product need not indicate creativity at all; a great work of art would tend to indicate a high level of creativity even if someone who produces a wide variety of good but lesser works might be considered “more creative.” Quality and quantity should be viewed and valued differently. My concern here is to note the difference, not to suggest a way of judging overall creativity in the light of the facts about each one.

II  Imagination as central for creativity Imagination is the chief constituent in creativity. Most of my examples suggest this. Creativity takes some brains, too; but people can be very brainy and rather unimaginative, or imaginative yet not particularly brainy.

28  Robert Audi Imagination is not all of creativity, however (nor am I seeking an a­ nalysis that captures the concept as a whole, if such an analysis is even possible for creativity). Someone could be imaginative but not especially creative. One case of this is that of reconstructive imagination: the kind exhibited in being able to draw a face expressing emotion from someone’s sketchy description or to fill in details from a skeletal narrative. In full-blown adult realizations, as opposed to childhood expressions or adult experiments, creativity also characteristically implies producing something worthwhile— at least for the creator. Such restricted value may be realized where someone composes fine verses in a dreamy stretch, but cannot remember them well enough to jot them down. This creation would show both imagination and inventiveness, but not everything the imagination produces merits anyone’s attention. Imagination as a faculty What, then, is imagination? It is largely the capacity to produce—often initially in the mental realm—new things.7 But if it is well developed in the way real creativity requires, it achieves a balance between novelty and other merits, notably truth where the product has propositional content. Products of the imagination may also exhibit such things as evocative power in non-representational works, musicality in poetry, and beauty in the visual arts. Not everything new is true or significantly valuable; and, of course, not everything true or significantly valuable is new. Novelty without truth—or value of some kind—can be largely worthless; truth without novelty can be mere platitude. It is easy to invent a word, say “rockaphony,” meaning “loud, repetitive, dissonant music,” but we may not need the term. And truths are evident everywhere. The blue spruce tree before me has at least six times more needles than branches. This may even be hitherto unbelieved, but I still deserve no credit for its discovery. There is in fact a trade-off between novelty and (significant) truth in productions with propositional content that aspire to creativity: novelty is easier to get if one sacrifices truth, and truth is easier to achieve if one moves little beyond what is already known. Creativity in propositionexpressing works is partly an ability to reach the right balance between truth and novelty—significant novelty, to be sure: what is merely new may be of no interest or value. Three further points will shed more light on what imagination is. First, imagination, even operating just in the intellectual realm, is not just a matter of linear inferential power. An intelligent person—or a machine— can deduce various theorems from an axiom, but it takes imagination to come up with valuable axioms in the first place, such as Euclid’s postulates for geometry or Peano’s axioms. It can also take imagination to find

Creativity, imagination, and intellectual virtue  29 useful theorems; a fruitful deductive path may be hidden by the underbrush of irrelevant implications or difficult to discover among the promising options. Imagination can also be required, then, to find a valuable theorem. It can even be needed to see that a theorem follows, but I am not implying that all inferential power is linear or even that every inference that proceeds wholly by self-evident steps from an axiom to a theorem, and in that sense linearly provides a route to that theorem discoverable by just any rational person who reflects on the axiom in question.8 Second, and related to non-linearity, imagination is not codifiable: there is no formula for being imaginative.9 Consider science, where some might expect a high degree of codification. As philosophers of science have said, there is a logic of verification, but not of discovery. Given a hypothesis, say, that fluorocarbons damage the ozone layer, we can use scientific method to verify it—though even here we may need imagination to see just how to apply the method. But given only a scientific problem, such as how to reverse the greenhouse effect, we are thrown back on our imaginations. Knowledge of the facts about climate and pollution is essential, but not sufficient. Third, imagination is not the same as intuition, though intuition is in at least many cases a component in imagination. Intuition is something like a capacity for directly grasping certain kinds of truths or relations, and a person with a lot of it can see things about people, or about intellectual problems, more readily than others. One could probably not have much imagination without intuition. Intuition, moreover, is an indispensable aid to judgment. But a person could have a lot of intuition without much imagination. Intuition grasps what is already there, and is in that sense passive; imagination produces something new, or reproduces something previously experienced, and is in that sense active. Moreover, whereas a person would be deficient in intuition (intuitive strength) if exposure to certain truths did not produce a positive cognitive response and also if, too often or in important matters, falsehoods were intuitive for the person, then imagination is not similarly constrained. This does not entail that truth, including falsehoods as negations of it, is irrelevant to imagination. Missing falsehoods can count against being imaginative, especially where the propositions are believed or presupposed against the inclinations of the person exercising imagination or, more important, undermine the coherence or value of the imaginative product. It may also be that, other things equal, an imaginative product is better in some rough relation to the ratio of truths to falsehoods it significantly involves—a view that does not even apply to all domains of imagination and needs explication even in the many kinds of literary cases to which it does apply. A short literary excursion may prove edifying. Here is part of a speech by Theseus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

30  Robert Audi The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

Act v, scene i

Several major points are voiced in these deceptively simple lines. The imagination surveys an unlimited field—from heaven to earth. It discerns the forms of things unknown, not just their vague outlines, and places unfamiliar things in an intelligible context: a local address and a name. It does this partly by using analogy and metaphor. Literary examples abound— including many in Shakespeare. But even in something so mundane as the software business, we find imaginative metaphors: moving blocks of print up or down on a computer screen is called scrolling, and relocating items is dubbed cutting and pasting. We also find a lack of imagination in the design of grammar checkers that flag a multitude of good sentences. Some dimensions of imagination The imagination, and with it creativity, has various dimensions. One is insight—both analytical, yielding a sense of how similar things should be distinguished—and synthetic, yielding a sense of how different things may be connected. Another is foresight—an ability to see significant consequences events will have and, sometimes, to anticipate the apparently unpredictable. Without foresight, one is condemned to hindsight; this is one of the dearest prices we can pay for a lack of imagination. These two visionary capacities seem natural in some people, but education and experience can enhance them. Both, moreover, are factive. At least, they are if we do not demand exactitude: an insight is normally a truth and, if short of truth, can be only so far from unqualified truth. A similar point holds for foresight. A third dimension of imagination is inventiveness, which is what I have been mainly speaking about. There are at least two kinds. Instrumental inven­ tiveness finds new means to established ends, such as ways to cure a disease. By contrast, what might be called intrinsic inventiveness yields valuable ends, such as works of literature and art deserving contemplation in their own right whether they are means to anything further or not.10 And the two kinds of inventiveness can be combined, for instance, in the creation of a theory that is both beautiful and useful. Instrumental inventiveness is the kind crucial for implementation of aims and ideas. Goals worth achieving and policies that deserve realization

Creativity, imagination, and intellectual virtue  31 may gather dust if no one figures out how to implement them. Imagination has, we might say, not just a what but, commonly, a how; there are substantive expressions of it and instrumental ideas that go with them. Think of theoretical physics and of engineering, for instance. Some creative people are stronger in one or the other of these dimensions of imagination. Both are essential for the full expression of creativity. Is imagination teachable? Can we teach people to be imaginative or creative? There are aspects of this question that require psychological research. These are not my concern. My concern is to make some general points that are neutral with respect to the likely discoveries yet to be made through such research. One such point is that there is no formula for teaching imagination; it is something we stimulate and nourish more than teach.11 Teachers do, to be sure, have a special role here, but almost anyone can try to contribute to the stimulation and nurturance of imagination. For maximal success, we must (among other things) model imagination, which means that we have to try to be imaginative ourselves in working with those we should lead. We can also stress and develop appreciation for writers and other creative people who constitute models. A diet of facts and figures, or of science taught by rote, or even of mediocre humanistic literature, is unlikely to contain much nourishment for creativity. In nurturing creativity in formal and informal education, we can try to present new ideas often and old ideas in an imaginative way; we can speculate on possibilities, look at an idea from several points of view, construct illustrative or hypothetical examples even if they seem odd, and raise questions that would not ordinarily arise. We can also try to give several different reasons for or against a view. In different ways, this can enhance both the likelihood of engendering disagreement and the prospects for consensus. The better the reasons, the better the chance that those who must be persuaded will accept at least one and be motivated accordingly; but disagreement can also motivate inquiry and other kinds of action. Philosophical activity is a leading source of the kinds of intellectual and imaginative stimulation in question. Granted, this practice of variegated illustration and multiple argumentation can make listeners wonder whether one is illustrating or arguing for its own sake; but the point is that each argument provides a different way to understand why the conclusion holds and can additionally support the belief that it does hold. This applies as much to selling products or negotiating contracts as to abstract matters. As many philosophical works illustrate, arguments are both paths to understanding and pillars of conviction. If one path is blocked—or too steep for us—another

32  Robert Audi may take us to comprehension; if one pillar collapses, whether from ­counterargument, skeptical doubts, or mere forgetfulness, another pillar may sustain the position. To some readers, it may be apparent that I have treated imagination as, in a very wide sense, essentially intellectual. But what good is imagination in business or the professions, or indeed in much of everyday life, if it produces only mental constructions that nourish mainly the intellect? In answering, we must not lose sight either of the intrinsic value of exercising imagination or of the subtler instrumental values of doing this, such as producing satisfaction in one’s work, providing relief from the pressure of daily tasks, and generating enthusiasm for practical work. Still, it must be granted that imagination carries neither its own executive power nor a facility for application of its creations to real-life problems. It does not entail action or even motivation, and its products need not be in any way practical. Motivation and many actions it powers are, however, important for individual flourishing and, interpersonally, both for role modeling of creativity and imagination and for leadership. These, in turn, are important both in intimate settings and in public situations ranging from the workplace to the academy to public political activities. Moral imagination The phrase “moral imagination” has become popular, but it remains in need of clarification.12 It should not be construed, as is natural, on analogy with moral character. That construal yields a contrast with non-moral imagination, but the notion of moral imagination is not a concept of a kind of imagination; “moral imagination” is most commonly used to refer to imagination in the moral sphere. Why is it so needed there? For a virtue ethics, moral standards, in the sense in which they can be articulated for guiding behavior, require imagination and judgment for their plausible formulation. Indeed, what is morally basic in this ethical approach is not propositional, but virtues of character. These require finding what Aristotle called a mean between excess and deficiency. That Aristotelian standard is no mere statistical construct. Neither the mean nor any principle reflecting it is reliably determinable from virtue concepts without practical wisdom as embodying a good measure of imagination.13 A similar reliance on imagination and practical wisdom is only slightly less applicable to Kant. How easy is it to tell whether—as his Categorical Imperative requires—a principle of action can be rationally universalized and serve as a guide to moral decision? Happily, he provided a promising alternative formulation—enjoining us to treat persons as ends in themselves and never merely as means. But this, too, requires interpretation in order to guide conduct. Can we, for instance, determine what it is to treat

Creativity, imagination, and intellectual virtue  33 persons as ends, if we lack a quite detailed understanding of the good for human beings—and a substantial degree of imagination?14 Utilitarianism as we find it in, say, John Stuart Mill, may seem less dependent on practical wisdom and imagination. In one interpretation of his principle of utility, it says that an act is obligatory if and only if it has at least as much utility as any alternative available to the agent, where utility is understood in terms of contribution to the happiness of sentient beings, measured by the “ratio” of pleasure to pain caused by the act, with quality as well as quantity taken into account.15 But the principle has significant vagueness. This holds regarding the notions of pleasure and pain, the concept of the quality of a pleasure, and the scope of the reference to sentient beings—for instance, concerning how animals figure and how far into the future consequences matter for moral decision. Second, there is a tradeoff problem (which Mill himself recognized): the difficulty of measuring quality against quantity. Mill proposed a formula for dealing with it, but left us with an indeterminacy.16 Clearly, then, moral imagination is needed to apply general moral standards at all like any of these major instances. So is practical wisdom, but moral imagination is certainly part of that. Through the exercise of moral imagination, creativity may be manifested at a high level, but neither entails the other: as in non-moral realms, an exercise of imagination may fall short of manifesting creativity, and of course creativity need not occur in the moral realm at all. Value and valuing: the psychological and the axiological Both in relation to products of creativity and in relation to moral imagination, I have spoken of the valuable in the sense of what is good in itself— intrinsically good or, in another common terminology, intrinsically desirable. What is intrinsically good is contrasted with what is instrumentally good, good as a means—as an instrument, if you like—for bringing about something else. A thing can be both: enjoying beautiful music can be good in itself and a means to reducing anxiety. But instrumental goodness is relative and need not provide reason for action to realize it. The instrumental goodness of a weed-killer for destroying a flower bed gives us no reason to use it for this; if the weeds it is designed to kill cease to be a problem, we may discard it. By contrast, the intrinsic goodness of enjoying beautiful music provides a reason to seek such experience. We are not in general able to realize intrinsic goods of all the kinds there are, but something intrinsically good is never to be cast aside like an obsolete instrument. It is easy to fall into confusion in thinking about value. There are two major points here. Both bear on how to understand the value of products of creativity and indeed, how to determine what kinds of activities and products of human endeavor count significantly toward creativity.

34  Robert Audi The first point (illustrated earlier) is that we must distinguish between intrinsic and instrumental value and must realize that certain things having no intrinsic value are nevertheless important. A good diet, for example, is so important that it might easily be thought to be intrinsically valuable—as indeed the pleasures of consuming it may be. Important goods may be purely instrumental. A second point is no less significant but more often missed. Given how often we speak of people’s valuing this or that, and of “human values,” a different confusion easily arises. Value as a kind of worth is one thing; valuing, as something close to caring, is quite different. Conflating these is abetted by how commonly what we care about is intrinsically valuable and hence does have worth. This is how it should be, but—as vanity and hunger for power show—people sometimes care about things that are neither good in themselves nor lead to anything that is. Valuing is not always directed toward the valuable. The notion of the intrinsically valuable is normative and belongs to ethics, aesthetics, and related fields that provide prescriptive standards. The notion of valuing is psychological and is descriptive rather than prescriptive. To value something intrinsically is at least threefold: it is, first, to want to experience, possess, bring about, or otherwise positively regard or act toward it “for its own sake”; second, to tend to feel positively toward it; and, third, in those who have value concepts, it is accompanied by a tendency—which can easily be misguided—to take it to be valuable. We value some things, such as good conversation, intrinsically, and others, such as insurance policies, instrumentally, simply as means. But unfortunately we can value, in either way, what is not good in any sense, and we can fail to value what is intrinsically good. A major question is whether the valuable may be understood as what is or would, under appropriate conditions, be valued for its own sake. Certainly we conceive valuable creations as worthy of being so valued, but is worthiness here a matter of being such that a certain kind of “observer”—in the broad sense of someone who experiences the creation in question—would value it under certain conditions? A plausible view in this territory is found in Hume’s pronouncement: Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, perfected by comparison, improved by practice, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character … [and, he added] the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.17

Suppose we could “naturalize” all the apparently normative terms here, e.g. “delicate,” “perfected,” and “prejudice.” We might then have a kind of naturalized ideal observer view of intrinsic value at least in the aesthetic realm. I doubt that this project can lead to a reductive analysis of the

Creativity, imagination, and intellectual virtue  35 concept of intrinsic value, but Hume was right in taking the discriminative capacity he cites as providing conceptually relevant evidence of intrinsic value at least in the aesthetic domain.18 Surely we should at the very least attend to the criteria of competent judgment Hume cites in appraising the value of creations we are viewing as candidates to count as manifestations of creativity or the kind of imaginativeness that seems to be a major constituent in creativity.

III  Creativity and imaginativeness as virtues The previous section might suggest that imaginativeness and creativity, when sufficiently developed to constitute virtues, are being conceived as broadly moral virtues, at least when they are both features of character and their expression is guided in the right ways by theoretical and practical reason. But, plainly, each of these traits can be as it were sectorial. One could be creative intellectually but lack moral imagination; creative just in mathematics but not in other intellectual endeavors; imaginative and inventive in dealing with problems in running a machine shop but not in anything aesthetically significant; morally but not intellectually imaginative, and so forth. Where a person may be credited with the virtue of creativity or imaginativeness, the trait must have a certain breadth.19 To be sure, for an academic appointment in mathematics, someone might be said to have the virtue of creativity where only mathematics is in question. But where the context of attribution precludes such narrow focus, as where a person’s virtues are listed in an overall appraisal, creativity extends beyond a single significant area. The concept is indeterminate as to how wide the domain must be. In addition to being sectorially describable, creativity and imaginativeness are mixed virtues in the sense that they are not just intellectual or practical, but have significant aspects in each domain (I assume for convenience that the intellectual and practical dimensions represent the most important division between kinds of virtue; if that is not so, they still differ enough to justify calling virtues with major aspects on each side mixed). When creativity and imaginativeness are possessed globally, as where a person is creative without qualification, manifestations of both theoretical and practical kinds are expectable (perhaps entailed). There must normally be at least one sector in each of the two broad realms in which creativity is manifested. The more sectors, the more creative the person is, other things equal. Given that creativity is possible in the mind alone, and given that even producing physical creations of the kind that count toward creativity typically manifests a kind of intellectual capacity, one might think that if creativity is a virtue then it is an intellectual kind. If we distinguish between

36  Robert Audi external and internal products of creativity and imagination, and if we can agree that intellectual virtues do not require only cognitive products such as knowledge, insight, and recognition, we will find it quite reasonable to attribute a practical side to creativity and imagination and thus to view them as mixed virtues. Even practical wisdom could be acquired by an observer who does nothing with it. Creating is a kind of doing; knowing is not, however much knowledge bears on action or even (normally) produces tendencies to act. It would be unfruitful to devote a great deal of time here to taxonomy; my main concern is to do justice to the mental side of creativity without over-intellectualizing it. Neither creativity nor imaginativeness need be, in all their forms, virtues, in the usual sense in which these are character traits. They may, for instance, be episodic, as where we praise someone’s creativity in a project even though we do not believe creativity to be characteristic of the person. They may also be manifested in low-quality products. By contrast, if creativity is a virtue in someone rather than just a characteristic, some significant degree of quality is apparently required in the relevant creative activities or products. A virtue must yield a measure of success in its characteristic expressions, though, to be sure, for creativity there is no closed list of even flexible criteria for success. It may be a mark of the highest kind of creativity to yield something of value that forces a revision of any list of desiderata we might have earlier devised. It should also be stressed that the practical side of mixed virtues need not be moral. Indeed, an immoral person can be both imaginative and creative. This does not imply, however, that moral appraisals are inappropriate to aesthetic appraisal, which is a type applicable to most kinds of creative works. Here, however, we must not take relevance to imply automatic applicability or, given application, to entail criteria that provide either necessary or sufficient conditions. Metaphoricity of a certain kind is a criterion for being a poem: it is conceptually relevant but not a necessary or sufficient condition. Moral significance of some kind might also be similarly relevant to being a (full-scale) novel, but it is not necessary or sufficient for a work’s being a novel or, arguably, even for its being an aesthetically great one.20 The association between creativity and imagination invites a number of questions. One is whether they are expressible wholly in the mind. The answer is clearly yes: Shakespeare would have been no less creative if he had “written” all his works mentally and never penned or communicated them. The more important question related to the internal and external dimensions of creativity concerns how internal elements must figure in both its possession and its manifestation. In normal cases the expressions of creativity are in a sense premeditated, or at least in some way thought through. Even if an artist just begins painting or writing, the process is normally guided by a kind of thinking.

Creativity, imagination, and intellectual virtue  37 Still, should we consider someone less creative if the person simply sat down and wrote out fine poetry, with only the mental activity required for tracking the output? We would be mystified about how this happens, but if the person were, in enough other ways, normal we should surely be willing to ascribe creativity. Here “imagination” and “imaginativeness” are less natural. This may be because imagination is naturally associated with imaging or, at least, with “thinking things up,” conceived as getting prospects in mind, sometimes in silent soliloquy, and realizing them. Imagination, when conceived as a virtue, carries an implication of construction that characteristically emerges from within; creativity, even when a virtue, implies more about the character of the external manifestations and less, if anything, about the mode of creation.

IV  Creativity as a human good Creativity is admired and sought not merely for its manifestations, great though their value often is. When, as an element in character, it is a virtue in a person, it is admirable and worthy of cultivation for its own sake. It may have incalculable instrumental value, but it is also a human good. So is imaginativeness as a virtue. I take being a human good to imply having value in itself. This certainly applies where creativity and imaginativeness are virtues, but suppose that, as traits, they can be possessed by someone highly creative in producing bad things, whether in art or some other realm. This seems to be a case where the overall value of the state of affairs, the person’s creating bad things, may be negative though the value of the creativity that is, we might say, misdirected, is positive. This is like the case of a sadist’s enjoying causing someone pain: this is the wrong way to achieve pleasure and, overall, a bad thing, but we need not deny value in the pleasure in order to justify that diagnosis. If the pleasure has no value in itself, it is at least difficult to explain why it is something that sadists do not deserve. It ill-befits their malice. However we analyze cases of misdirected creativity, we can see that the very process of creation is often distinctively rewarding. The reward, moreover, is not always proportional to the value of the creation. Great pleasure, even at a high level, is possible in creative writing, musical composition, painting, and many other intellectual or aesthetic activities, even if the product is not good. This is compatible with saying the pleasure or other intrinsically valuable aspects of the experience are greater when the product is good (or at least when the creator has a reasonable sense that it is), but few with experience of creative expression would deny that it is among the things that make intrinsically attractive both the activities in question and the kind of life in which they are prominent. Creativity as manifested in inherently valuable products is also instrumentally good, and in the best way. These are the kinds of products the

38  Robert Audi experience of which, for their intrinsic properties, is intrinsically valuable. They are thus potential constituents in a good life, not just aids to its realization in the way shelter, vehicles, and medicines are. Artworks worthy of our experiencing them—reading, hearing, viewing, and so forth—are noninstrumentally good and give us non-instrumental reasons to value them. Nothing I have said implies that what has only instrumental value is unimportant. Consider medicine, which may be life-saving. But there is a special kind of instrumental value that creativity and imaginativeness have in relation to other virtues. Here, moral imagination is one kind of example, but consider beneficence and fidelity on the moral side and clarity and rigor on the intellectual side. To be (virtuously) beneficent toward others, I must discern what advances their good, and to be virtuously (not slavishly) faithful to them I must be able to see what they should want of me in novel situations where their likes or preferences are unclear. In both cases, I do best if I have the imagination to discern options and creativity in realizing them. To be clear and rigorous, we must imagine alternative ways of expressing what we want to communicate and must be creative in dealing with problems that arise as we face problems or opposition. Clarity may require imagining the interpretation of an ordinary reader with little orienting background; rigor may require imagining likely objections and replies to them—or revisions that make the objections irrelevant. _____ Creativity is best understood as a characteristic of a person. It may be temporary or a feature of character, and when it is the latter it may rise to being a virtue. Products of the exercise of creativity may be called “creative” derivatively, or, as has also been illustrated, the trait of creativity itself may be understood as that character element whose exercise tends to produce such products. The examples and points proposed here indicate that understanding creativity does not require taking either the trait or the products of its exercise as conceptually basic in framing an account of creativity; what is crucial is to understand their relation to one another. In either case, creativity, like the nearly equivalent notion of inventiveness, should be understood as closely connected with imagination. Both creativity and imagination can be manifested in many different domains, and both are elements in rewarding lives and, when they constitute virtues in a person, elements in human good. In contemporary life, both are also most prominent, or are in any case most often attributed to people, in the aesthetic domain. This does not make other domains, such as those of the various branches of learning, less important in relation to creativity. In particular, imagination, and with it creative solutions to practical problems, operates in important ways in the moral realm. My hope here is to

Creativity, imagination, and intellectual virtue  39 have provided an understanding of the nature and breadth of creativity and imagination in ways that may help both in understanding them and, so far as possible, exercising them in our own activities as individuals and in teaching them where we can.21

Notes 1 If, for instance, a perfect being is omniscient (as God is taken to be in perfect being theology), then this being knows all the possibilities, and creativity will be a matter of selection among them for realization, not, say, of discovering them or inventing something not previously conceived. 2 For Boden (2010, 30), “Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising, and valuable.” I doubt that creativity entails producing anything new in any ordinary sense and that creative works need be surprising—as opposed to being the opposite of tedious, hackneyed, or slavishly imitative. My views overlap hers at significant points but differ overall, though in other work she has construed creativity in a way that accommodates my point here; see Boden (2004). 3 What counts as too much cannot easily be specified and requires aesthetic judgment—certainly unity itself may require a measure of predictability, and internal predictability admits of degrees (so might external predictability under indeterminism). We must also allow that creativity may be exhibited by just part of a work, and that internal predictability of certain parts is compatible with overall creativity. The application of the distinction between external and internal predictability is more complicated for visual arts and other art forms but cannot be pursued here. 4 The reference to predictability in any ordinary way is necessary because, if determinism—as the view that every event is caused by some antecedent event in accord with universal laws—is even approximately true, then all phenomena might be predictable in principle. I doubt that determinism is true, but in any case creativity does not entail external unpredictability and does involve the indicated kind of relativity. Suppose, however, that in principle—or with a very advanced technology laboriously applied—one could predict a work of computer art in every detail. I see no need either to deny that the work is really a kind of art or even that the computer in question is in a way creative. It might, for instance, create delightful products of different kinds and at a good rate. (This might or might not bespeak creativity in the programmer.) 5 It is difficult to specify the sense in which creativity is relative to what is accessible to one. You could exhibit much creativity in producing on your own some of the splendid ideas already contained, utterly unbeknownst to you, in your library, in a language you cannot read. But if we come up with a great idea we heard in a lecture some years ago, this will not normally count toward our creativity. 6 One question raised by the concept of invention is how to characterize it when viewed as a ­realization of a possibility. On a Platonic view, inventors instantiate or somehow realize uncreated abstract entities. In a sense, invention is then conceived as a kind of discovery. My main points are neutral regarding this Platonic view and views on which invention involves a stronger kind of what might be called originating. For detailed discussion of these questions, see Levinson (1990). Works by Peter Kivy and Amie Thomasson also address the metaphysical status of artworks. 7 This needs qualification, as suggested by the example of calculus. If there is a world in a distant galaxy in which someone wrote a novel matching Middlemarch, authoring that might be no less an indication of creativity. As noted above, what is accessible to the author is crucial. 8 The notion of linear inference should be understood in part by contrast with that of inference to the best explanation (abduction). My previous work (1999) presents a detailed discussion of inference in relation to the self-evident. 9 It is not easy to specify what counts as a formula. I have in mind a specification of a procedure that, even if not strictly algorithmic, can be followed by an ordinary human being through the application of nothing beyond instrumental rationality (perhaps, then, in principle by a machine).

40  Robert Audi 10 This distinction is related to one studied in management literature: between transactional and transformational leadership. The former requires instrumental inventiveness but little if anything in intrinsic inventiveness; the latter is required by (though it does not exhaust) transformational leadership. 11 Denying that there is such a formula does not commit one to denying that there are useful heuristics. For discussion of these, see Hayek (this volume). 12 Tim Mulgan (this volume) makes a significant step toward the needed clarification. 13 This is quite clear in books 1 and 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics, though Aristotle directly provides a definite role for imagination in those texts. He does maintain that we should ask no more precision than our subject-matter permits. For instance, he defines virtue very broadly: as a characteristic involving choice that consists in observing the mean relative to us, which is defined by a rational principle, such as one a person of practical wisdom would use to determine choices (1106b36–1107a5). 14 The difficulty of interpreting Kant’s Categorical Imperative is widely discussed. He gives many examples in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and also published many lectures on ethics, which apply his general ideas; but in places his own interpretation seems to fail to do justice to the power and subtlety of his own theory, as where he takes perfect duties, such as avoidance of lying, to override all imperfect duties, such as protection of the innocent.  An insightful recent discussion of Kant’s Categorical Imperative is provided by Parfit (2011). For an account of the central notions in the “intrinsic end” formulation and, esp. the notions of treatment of persons merely as means vs. ends, see (2016). 15 One can formulate the principle in terms of expected utility; but that complication is not needed here. We can also assume that utilitarians will have a theory of excuses; hence if one does something objectively wrong, one may be excusable provided one justifiably considered the utility of the act optimal. 16 Mill spoke of “the rule for measuring it [quality] against quantity, being the preference felt by [all or almost all?] those who in their opportunities of experience, to which must be added their habits of self-consciousness and self-observation, are best furnished with the means of comparison” (1859/1979, ch. 2). He left indeterminate whether a simple majority suffices here or whether a stronger consensus is needed. For lucid discussion of how best to interpret utilitarianism, see Mill (2000). 17 Hume (1958, 446). 18 Brandt (1979) provided an important kind of naturalistic account of rationality and, implicitly, other normative notions along Humean lines, and many philosophers have followed him in refining Humean approaches. 19 This claim and others in this section (given space limitations) are not compared with earlier work on creativity as a virtue. See, e.g., Kieran (2014). See also the papers by Baehr and Gaut in this volume. 20 For detailed discussion that largely supports these points see Gaut (1998). An essential distinction he makes is between a work’s being moral or immoral and morality or immorality in a work. Aesthetic appraisal should take account of these in different ways. 21 This paper has benefited from discussion with Susan Feagin, Gary Hagberg, and Dominic Lopes and from comments on an earlier draft by Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran.

References Aristotle (2000). Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Roger Crisp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Audi, R. (1999). “Self-Evidence,” Philosophical Perspectives 13 (205–228). Audi, R. (2016). Means, Ends, and Persons: The Meaning and Psychological Dimensions of Kant’s Humanity Formula. New York: Oxford University Press.

Creativity, imagination, and intellectual virtue  41 Boden, M. (2004). The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, second ed. London: Routledge. Boden, M. (2010). Creativity & Art: Three Roads to Surprise. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brandt, R. B. (1979). A Theory of the Good and the Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaut, B. (1998). “The Ethical Criticism of Art,” in Jerrold Levinson, ed., Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 182–203. Hooker, B. (2000). Ideal Code, Real World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hume, D. (1958). “Of the Standard of Taste,” reprinted in Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment, eds. Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon McKenzie. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World. Kieran, M. (2014). “Creativity as a Virtue of Character,” in E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman, eds., The Philosophy of Creativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, J. (1990). “What a Musical Work Is,” reprinted in his Music, Art, and Metaphysics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mill, J. S. (1859/1979). Utilitarianism, ed. George Sher. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Parfit, D. (2011). On What Matters, esp. vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3

Intellectual creativity Jason Baehr

One approach to virtue epistemology conceives of intellectual virtues as excellences of intellectual character. Familiar virtues on this approach include traits like curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, and intellectual courage.1 Creativity, by contrast, has received scant attention among virtue epistemologists: it appears on few if any standard lists of intellectual virtues and its precise nature, structure, and value have gone largely unexplored.2 Could this be an accidental oversight? Or is there something problematic about conceiving of creativity as an intellectual virtue? There are some reasons for thinking that creativity may not be an intellectual virtue. One is that it often manifests in activity aimed at nonepistemic ends, like the creation of a work of art or of some new piece of technology. Intellectual virtues, on the other hand, are said to aim at distinctively epistemic ends like knowledge and understanding.3 A second reason concerns the intuitive relationship between creativity and “creative genius.”4 At least at first glance, this association suggests that creativity may more closely resemble an innate talent or ability than a cultivated strength of personal character. Other initial considerations tell in favor of conceiving of creativity as an intellectual virtue. First, while clearly relevant to artistic activities and aims, creativity also bears on various epistemic practices, including practices central to science. Indeed, the history of science is filled with creative theories, experiments, and discoveries.5 Given the epistemic aims and dimensions of science, this is prima facie evidence for thinking that creativity is, or at least can be, an intellectual virtue. Second, creativity is often upheld as an important educational aim.6 In addition to imparting knowledge and sharpening skills, good education is also thought to inspire curious and creative minds.7 This suggests, contra the point above about creative genius, that creativity is not a mere talent: that most students (and therefore most people) can grow in creativity. Creativity’s status as an intellectual virtue appears to be uncertain. Given the indisputable value of creativity to various domains and practices, this status is worth exploring. In what follows, I argue that creativity

Intellectual creativity  43 is an intellectual virtue on par with other intellectual virtues of the sort that interest virtue epistemologists. More precisely, I argue that there is a plausible and reasonably familiar way of conceiving of creativity according to which it is an intellectual virtue. I do not purport that the concept of creativity elucidated here answers to every ordinary or theoretical way of thinking about creativity. Rather, I take for granted a kind of pluralism about concepts or varieties of creativity.8 My aim is to identify a single concept of creativity that (1) is present in ordinary and theoretical conceptions of creativity and (2) fits well with a familiar view of the structure of an intellectual virtue.

The structure of an intellectual virtue I begin by sketching a structural model according to which intellectual virtues have four primary dimensions.9 This first is a skill or ability dimension. For every intellectual virtue V, there is an intellectual skill or ability with respect to which the possessor of V must be competent—a skill that provides a way of distinguishing V from other intellectual virtues. To be open-minded, for instance, a person must be skilled at taking up and giving a fair and honest consideration to perspectives very different from her own.10 Such skill or competency is what differentiates open-mindedness from other intellectual virtues like curiosity and intellectual humility, each of which has a characteristic skill of its own (viz. asking thoughtful and insightful questions and “owning” one’s intellectual limitations and mistakes, respectively). Second, a person can possess the skill characteristic of a given virtue while being unmotivated to use it. Without the relevant motivation, the virtue will also go unpossessed. Thus, intellectual virtues also have a motiva­ tional dimension. On a familiar view of this dimension, intellectual virtues are rooted in a “love” of (i.e. a desire for or commitment to) epistemic goods like truth, knowledge, and understanding.11 That is, if one possesses an intellectual virtue V, then one is motivated to practice the skill or ability characteristic of V out of a desire for or commitment to such goods. Many virtue epistemologists also hold that the motivation in question is at least partly intrinsic, which is to say that an intellectually virtuous person cares about and is motivated to pursue epistemic goods at least partly as such or for their own sake (i.e. not simply on account of an instrumental connection with other, non-epistemic goods or ends).12 Third, a further and related dimension of intellectual virtues is affective. To possess intellectual virtues in their fullness, one must take an appropriate pleasure or satisfaction in their exercise and in related ends and activities. An open-minded person, for instance, enjoys taking up and considering alternative perspectives. A person who finds such activity annoying or tedious lacks genuine or full open-mindedness. Similarly, an intellectually

44  Jason Baehr virtuous person characteristically feels pain, dissatisfaction, or regret at the frustration or failure of her cognitive endeavors. Therefore, the possession of an intellectual virtue requires, not just that one be motivated to practice the skill characteristic of this virtue, but also that one experience certain fitting or appropriate affective states in connection with such practice. Fourth, empirical research suggests that a person can be skilled in a particular intellectual virtue and motivated to use this skill, while nonetheless failing to do so on a consistent basis.13 The explanation? The person lacks good judgment about when or where or how much the skill ought to be practiced. Accordingly, the structure of an intellectual virtue also includes a kind of “practical wisdom” or judgment dimension.14 Intellectually virtuous activity is rationally regulated—it is informed and guided by “right reason” or good judgment. This dimension need not be explicitly deliberative or calculating; on the contrary, intellectually virtuous activity is often automatic or spontaneous in the sense that it manifests a settled intellectual disposition or habit acquired over time. Such activity (e.g. a careful examination of a text or an open and honest consideration of an objection) can be and often is guided by reason without involving conscious deliberation or explicit inference.

Creativity: a sketch In the present section, I develop an account of creativity conceived of as an intellectual virtue, that is, an account of what I will henceforth refer to as “intellectual creativity.” Again, my aim is an account of intellectual creativity that (1) fits reasonably well with ordinary and theoretical ways of thinking about creativity and (2) conforms to the four-dimensional structural model just outlined.

Some putative features of creativity I begin by noting several putative features of creativity simpliciter. Each feature enjoys intuitive support as well as support from the philosophical or psychological literature on creativity. I contend that a satisfactory account of creativity (whether intellectual or otherwise) must either make sense of or successfully “explain away” the following claims: 1 As the term itself suggests, creativity involves an act of creation. It involves the production of something—be it a piece of art, business solution, scientific theory, poem, technological instrument, philosophical argument, or some other entity. Creativity, in other words, has a generative or productive aspect.15 2 Further, the products of creativity are new or unexpected.16 If an artist simply copies or mimics the work of another artist, the resulting

Intellectual creativity  45

3

4

5 6

7

8

work will be conspicuously deficient in creativity. The same holds for a scientific theory or explanation that is entirely obvious given the available data: while perhaps reasonable and well supported, such a theory is unlikely to exemplify creativity. This explains the close association between creativity and related attributes like originality and inventiveness. In addition to being new or unexpected, the products of creativity must also satisfy certain standards of value or excellence.17 Consider the recent hit musical Hamilton, which ingeniously combines hip hop with American history. Were Hamilton a bad musical, if the melding of musical theater, hip hop, and American history simply didn’t “work,” the production would fail to instantiate creativity. Creative products must be good or significant or valuable.18 Creativity is closely tied to the operation of the imagination.19 Creative people characteristically possess lively, active, and powerful imaginations. While a person can have poor eyesight and a bad memory while still being highly creative, having a poor imagination seriously complicates, if not precludes, the possession of creativity. Creativity involves a unique kind of perception. Creative people see the world differently. They notice things or possibilities or connections that escape the attention of uncreative people.20 Creativity is also importantly related to the notion of insight. It often begins with a unique thought, image, or idea—with a “creative insight.” Such insights form the basis of and play an important role in guiding and shaping the creative activity that ensues.21 Creativity often functions in a muse-like fashion.22 Creative insights often simply come to or dawn on creative persons, sometimes even in the form of dreams (e.g. Kekulé’s flash insight into the structure of the benzene molecule). As a general rule, the operation of creativity is not easy to control. Creative writers experience writer’s block, poets lose their muse, etc. Creative people find creative activity intrinsically rewarding. Their engagement in this activity frequently is motivated by goods internal to the creative process rather than by external goods like wealth or status.23

While far from exhaustive, these putative features of creativity provide a reasonable starting point for thinking in greater detail about the substance of creativity, including intellectual creativity.

Skill dimension I turn now to an account of creativity conceived of as an intellectual virtue with the four-dimensional structure sketched earlier. I begin with the

46  Jason Baehr skill dimension. This dimension constitutes the conceptual core of intellectual creativity. Once it has been elucidated, characterizing the additional three dimensions will be a relatively straightforward task.24 On the view to be developed here, the skill proper to intellectual creativity does not differ in kind from that which is proper to creativity simplic­ iter.25 Rather, intellectual creativity involves the possession of a generically creative skill relative to the epistemic domain, which for present purposes can be specified as the domain of pursuing and transmitting epistemic goods like knowledge, truth, and understanding. In terms of “pursuit,” this includes activities such as scientific, historical, philosophical, and other varieties of inquiry. In terms of “transmission,” it includes such activities as teaching and journalistic reporting. A person with intellectual creativity is creatively skilled in one or more contexts of this sort. How, then, might we understand the skill dimension of creativity sim­ plicter? I propose the following: (C) A creative person is skilled at (i) identifying new or unexpected possibilities and (ii) organizing a given set of elements in a way that reflects these possibilities and instantiates one or more values proper to the activity in question.

According to (C), the skill dimension of creativity has two main parts or aspects. First, it has what can be thought of as a cognitive aspect. This is a matter of identifying new or unexpected possibilities.26 Such identification might involve the noticing of certain existing details or connections (hence of possibilities that are also actualities, albeit ones that are unknown or unexpected). However, it can also involve an original formulation or conception of a (new or unexpected) possibility. Within an epistemic context, the possibilities in question might pertain to how a given collection of data can be explained (e.g. in the case of theory construction), how a particular view is vulnerable or immune to critique (e.g. in the case of generating or responding to objections), or how certain concepts of chunks of information might be structured or arranged (e.g. in the case of preparing a teaching lesson).27 Second, the skill component of creativity also involves what can be referred to as a productive aspect, which involves “organizing a given set of elements” in a way that reflects certain “new or unexpected possibilities” identified or conceived of by the creative person. Put another way, it involves creating something new or unexpected on the basis of a creative idea or insight.28 While the elements organized might be rather disparate and previously unassociated (e.g. a piece of music synthesizing diverse instruments or genres), they need not be. Rather, the organizing in question can also consist of a creative rearranging of already present

Intellectual creativity  47 or familiar objects (e.g. a Cubist painting). Again, in an epistemic context, the creative result or “product” might be a theory, counterexample, lesson plan, rhetorical strategy, or other vehicle central to the pursuit or transmission of epistemic goods. Moreover, the resulting product or arrangement must “instantiate one or more values proper to the activity in question.” This latter feature of (C) is intended to capture claim (3) above, which describes the products of creativity as significant or valuable. On the present view, creative products must satisfy normative standards specific to the type of creative activity at issue. A “new or unexpected” smartphone innovation that makes for a worse phone would not count as creative. The same goes for a short story that, while original in certain respects, is a bad story or bad qua story. Likewise, for an innovative scientific theory that lacks simplicity, predictive power, and other theoretical virtues. Again, the claim is not that the products of creativity must be good in some generic sense, nor that they are necessarily, say, morally or even aesthetically good. Rather, their value is determined by norms proper to the creative activity in question.29 This two-part account of the skill dimension of creativity comports well with several additional intuitive claims about creativity identified above. For instance, the cognitive element of (C) fits well with claims (4), (5), and (6), which identify a close association between creativity, on the one hand, and imagination, “unique perception,” and “insight,” on the other.30 It is plausible to think of imagination as the capacity or ability in virtue of which a creative person is skilled at “identifying new or unexpected possibilities,” that this process is facilitated by a certain kind of perception or attentiveness, and that it consists in or leads to creative insights. The productive aspect of creativity’s skill dimension also incorporates some of the putative features of creativity enumerated above. Specifically, it aligns with the idea, in (1), that creativity involves an act of creation. This idea is at the heart of the claim that creativity involves “organizing a given set of elements” in a way that reflects the identification of certain “new or unexpected possibilities.” This element of (C) also demonstrates a fit with (2), which stipulates that the products of creativity are “new or unexpected.” (C) is an account of the skill dimension of creativity simpliciter. As noted earlier, to capture the skill dimension of intellectual creativity, or of creativity conceived of as an intellectual virtue, the account must be relativized to the epistemic domain: (C*) An intellectually creative person is skilled or competent, (i) in the context of pursuing or transmitting epistemic goods, at (ii) identifying new or unexpected possibilities and (iii) organizing a given set of elements in a way that reflects these possibilities and instantiates one or more values proper to the activity in question.

48  Jason Baehr A couple of additional points about this characterization are in order. First, the skill at issue can be possessed to a greater or lesser degree. A person who is extremely competent at conceiving of interesting and novel scientific theories, for instance, can be said to possess this skill to some extent even if he lacks this competence in other relevant contexts (e.g. as a teacher). The degree to which a person possesses creative skill can also be a function of other factors, for example, of just how reliable she is at manifesting the skill in appropriate contexts (e.g. minimally reliable or extremely so), how many relevant values her creative performances tend to instantiate, and so on. Second, as an account of the skill dimension of intellectual creativity, (C*) purports to capture the “characteristic activity” of this virtue, that is, what the virtue tends to look like in practice. As such it may elicit an objection to the effect that creativity—including creativity applied to epistemic contexts—does not always or even typically proceed in the linear way indicated by the account. (C*) suggests a picture according to which creative persons have insights and subsequently go on to create things in light of these insights, while in reality, the process is often much messier, either because the creative process is not driven by an especially explicit or coherent vision or because it exhibits a kind of spiral structure, whereby an initial thought or insight leads to an initial stretch of creativity activity, which in turn leads to a deepening of the original insight (or to a further insight), which is then followed by additional creative activity, and so on, until the creative product or output appears.31 (C*) is intended to allow for such possibilities. Therefore, it is important to clarify that the “identification of new or unexpected possibilities” described by (C*) need not be a very explicit or choate cognitive state or process. To initiate the creative process, it must have some positive content; however, this is consistent with its being what the creative person himself might describe as an intuition or hunch, even a question. Similarly, this state or process need not be something that occurs only once in the production of a creative work. Rather, (C*) is intended to be consistent with the idea that a creative person might make several connections or identify several possibilities over a period of time that together lead to a single creative output. Thus, (C*) does not require—nor is it intended to suggest—that the skill characteristic of intellectual creativity always follows a simple linear path.

Motivational dimension Having articulated a view of the skill dimension of intellectual creativity, I turn to an account of its motivational dimension. As it is being conceived of here, intellectual creativity, like other intellectual virtues, is grounded in a “love” of epistemic goods. That is, a person with this virtue is disposed

Intellectual creativity  49 to conceive of new or unexpected possibilities out of a concern with ends like knowledge and understanding; the latter motivate and direct her creative intellectual activity. Notably, this concern need not be limited to the intellectually creative person’s own share in epistemic goods. It can also pertain to the epistemic well-being of others. Again, a teacher might be motivated to design a creative lesson out of a concern that her students develop a firm understanding of the material. Further, on the present view, the epistemic motivation underlying intellectual creativity is at least partly intrinsic. The intellectually creative teacher cares about his students’ understanding of the material at least partly for its own sake (not simply because of how this understanding might help them graduate, secure a good job, etc.). Similarly, a scientist who manifests intellectual creativity in the design of an experiment or in conceiving of a new theory is motivated at least partly by an intrinsic concern for truth or understanding (not merely by, say, the status or financial windfall a new discovery might bring).32 None of this implies that activity manifesting intellectual creativity must be exclusively motivated by an intrinsic concern with epistemic goods. Nor is it to say that such activity must be consciously based on an attempt to secure epistemic goods in the sense that it involves thinking explicitly about these goods as one engages in the creative process. On the contrary, the creative person’s immediate attention is likely to be on aspects of her creative activity itself or on the product emerging from this activity. Again, this is entirely consistent with the idea that part of what motivates and guides the activity of intellectually creative persons is an underlying intrinsic concern with epistemic goods. The foregoing is a prima facie plausible way of thinking about the motivational basis of creativity conceived of as an intellectual virtue. It fits well, for instance, with the claim in (8) above that creative activity tends to be motivated “by goods that are internal to the creative process rather than by external goods like wealth or status.” Further, recall that intellectual virtues are the character traits of a good learner or inquirer, where learning and inquiry are clear cases of epistemically motivated activities. It is plausible to think that among the more important abilities for successful learners or inquirers to possess is the ability to identify new possibilities or connections and to give expression to these in the solutions or theories they conceive of while attempting to reach the truth, acquire understanding, and the like. Moreover, “creativity” or “intellectual creativity” are apt labels for such an ability. It might be worried, however, that this motivational requirement is too restrictive. Specifically, issue might be taken with the claim the epistemic motivation underlying intellectual creativity must be (partly) intrin­ sic. Imagine, for example, a medical researcher who arrives at a creative

50  Jason Baehr solution to particular scientific problem or question, but whose creative intellectual activity is motivated entirely by her interest in developing a new therapy or technology. The researcher has no interest in the relevant scientific facts as such; she is interested in these facts strictly because of their potential connection with a therapeutic or technological breakthrough. It could be claimed that such a person might manifest a kind of intellectual creativity and that such creativity would rightly be considered an intellectual virtue, even though it is void of any intrinsic epistemic motivation. This is a reasonable objection. I offer only a limited rebuttal to it here.33 On the one hand, given the pluralism noted above about kinds or concepts of intellectual virtue, there may be viable conceptions of intellectual virtue according to which the researcher’s creative activity manifests an intellectual virtue. This would include a reliabilist conception, according to which a trait’s leading systematically to the formation of true beliefs and the avoidance of false ones is (more or less) both necessary and sufficient for the trait’s being an intellectual virtue.34 In connection with the present case, the reliabilist might say that the researcher’s creativity is an intellectual virtue because of how it systematically aids her attempts to better understand the relevant biological facts, even if she has intrinsic interest in these facts. Again, I have no objection to the idea that this is one acceptable way of looking at the case. However, it is not the only acceptable way. Many virtue epistemologists maintain that intellectual virtues are “personal excellences,” that is, that they make their possessor good or excellent or admirable qua person—and that they do so in a distinctively epistemic-cum-personal way. While I cannot develop the view here, I have argued elsewhere that the basis of such value is a positive orientation toward epistemic goods—an orientation that is partly constituted by an element of intrinsic epistemic motivation.35 This motivation is part of what gives intellectual virtues understood as personal excellences the distinctive value they have. This is the conception of intellectual virtues and their status as virtues that I am operating with here. Again, the suggestion is that intellectual creativity, conceived of as an intellectual virtue that contributes to its possessor’s excellence or admirability qua person, necessarily involves an intrinsic motivational dimension. I conclude that to the extent that such a conception is plausible, this motivational requirement is reasonable as well.36

Affective dimension I turn now to a third, affective dimension of intellectual creativity. This dimension includes, most notably, a disposition to take pleasure in creative activity. A creative person enjoys conceiving of and giving expression to new ideas and possibilities. This is not to say that she always takes pleasure

Intellectual creativity  51 in her creative activity. Indeed, as I elaborate on below, at times she may find it quite arduous. Rather, the claim is that in the psychology of the intellectually creative person, there exists a kind of agreement or complementarity between this person’s motivational states and her affective states: she desires or is committed to reaching the truth, this desire prompts her to engage in creative activity, and generally speaking (e.g. at the right time, in the right way, etc.) she finds this activity pleasing or enjoyable. This requirement is intended to exclude the possibility of an epistemic analogue of Aristotle’s “continent man” (in book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics), that is, of a person who reliably engages in creative intellectual activity, but who generally finds this activity dull or displeasing. Such a person would fall short of the virtue of intellectual creativity as conceived of here.37 That creative people should find pleasure in creative activity fits with (8) above and with several extant theoretical treatments of creativity.38 Intuitively, a brilliant and creative scientist or teacher is enthusiastic about her work; she takes delight in and is uplifted by identifying new ways of thinking, making unexpected connections, or arriving at innovative solutions. This claim is also supported by well-known empirical research on creativity by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1996: ch. 5) and others who identify pleasure in creative activity as one of the most salient and universal dispositions of creative people, including creative people engaged in epistemic pursuits.39 Thinking of intellectual creativity as involving certain positive affects is consistent with the familiar observation that the creative process is often difficult, even painful.40 Indeed, given the nature of the skill component of intellectual creativity, we should expect intellectually creative people to experience at least some pain or discomfort as a result of their creative activity. First, the kind of intellectual sensitivity that comes with being able to see things differently or to make new connections may often be accompanied by a broader sensitivity or awareness that can be emotionally demanding. Second, people who frequently go against the intellectual grain or make “outside the box” conjectures can expect to have their work met with a fair deal of incredulity—if not outright scorn—on the part of their peers, which can be a further source of anxiety or discomfort. At a minimum, creative thinkers are denied the comforts of conformity. Third, the activity of thinking differently or conceiving of new or unexpected ideas can itself be difficult. It involves the forging of new intellectual paths. This process can be slow and frustrating, proceeding in fits and starts. Therefore, while not a required or defining feature of intellectual creativity, negative affective states may regularly accompany its exercise.41 But again this is wholly consistent with the claim that in many other respects an intellectually creative person finds creative activity enjoyable and invigorating.

52  Jason Baehr

Judgment component I have argued that creativity conceived of as an intellectual virtue involves a skill dimension, a motivational dimension, and an affective dimension. While it can be tempting to think of these as jointly sufficient for the possession of intellectual creativity, we noted above that a person can be skilled and motivated to engage in certain forms of intellectually virtuous activity (e.g. an open-minded consideration of an opposing viewpoint) while nevertheless lacking a sense of when, to what extent, toward whom, and so on, to engage in this activity, that is, while lacking a critical form of practical judgment. The same is true of intellectual creativity. A person can be capable of engaging in intellectually creative activity, and motivated to engage in this activity, but nevertheless have poor judgment about, say, when her creative thinking has gone too far or when it needs to be reined in. In light of this, we would do well to conceive of intellectual creativity as partially comprised of a “judgment dimension,” whereby an intellectually creative person is reliable at recognizing situations that call for an exercise of her creative ability, and her creative activity is informed and regulated by reason. Again, this does not mean that intellectually creative activity is always deliberative or calculating, nor that an intellectually creative person can always articulate how or why her creative activity is rational. Rather, the claim is that an intellectually creative person’s judgment about when and how to proceed with her creative activity fits with or is reasonable given the immediate context—that she does not give up too easily, that she does not think too far outside the box, that she knows when and how to begin implementing or giving fuller expression to her creative insights, and so on. While rational judgment seems like a salient feature of some intellectual virtues, it might be viewed as less relevant in the case of intellectual creativity. Indeed, as noted in claim (7) above, we often think of creativity as operating in a kind of muse-like fashion, such that its operation is not amenable to rational judgment or control. Recall William Blake’s remark about the genesis of his epic poem Milton: “I have written this Poem from immediate dictation, twelve, or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even against my will” (Norton 2011). Similarly, some philosophers, including Plato, have even described creativity as a largely irrational phenomenon.42 These points might be taken to show that intellectual creativity, if it exists, lacks a judgment or rationality component on par with that of other intellectual virtues. Several replies are in order. First, here again it is important to note that there may be other viable conceptions of intellectual virtue according to which creativity conceived of as a kind of brute or muse-like cognitive ability is an intellectual virtue. This possibility is underscored by the conceptual pluralism endorsed above. The more pressing question is whether

Intellectual creativity  53 it would be a mistake to apply the term “creativity” to any intellectual attribute that does not function in this way, that is, whether it is essential to any form of personal creativity that it operate outside the purview of rational judgment or control. I see no antecedent reason to adopt such a restrictive position. In any case, that such a position is too demanding should be clear once the relationship between reason and imagination is examined in more detail below. Second, the present account of intellectual creativity is consistent with the possibility that the brute or muse-like functioning of a person’s imaginative faculty might regularly make a significant contribution to her creative activity. In this respect, intellectual creativity is akin to other intellectual virtues. A primary function of intellectual virtues is to harness and regulate the cognitive faculties that comprise a person’s basic cognitive endowment. Accordingly, intellectual creativity, understood as a strength of intellectual character, might involve the use of imagination to generate or build upon a spontaneously generated creative insight in much the same way that the virtue of careful observation might harness visual perception to identify an elusive physical detail (think of a scientist peering into a microscope) or how intellectual rigor or tenacity might be used to arrive at or tease out the implications of an important rational insight (as with a logician or mathematician attempting to see her way through an elaborate proof). In each of these cases, an intellectual virtue serves to facilitate or extend the “output” of a cognitive faculty. This illustrates the point that the brute operation or achievements of creative imagination are not necessarily distinct from the operation of intellectual creativity understood as an intellectual character virtue. Third, it is also important to bear in mind a considerable body of recent empirical research indicating that while creativity often seems to operate in sudden, unpredictable, or spontaneous ways, in fact creative insights often are the result of a creative person’s (potentially very deliberate) practice of or immersion in creative activities and environments over long periods of time—activities and environments that shape and condition the creative person’s imagination such that it eventually yields creative insights.43 This perspective on the origin of creativity suggests that thinking of creativity as operating in an arational or muse-like way may be misleading and that creativity may be more amenable to (indirect) rational effort and control than one might initially be led to think. The foregoing replies also suggest a way of handling a further objection that might be raised against the claim that intellectual creativity has a judgment or rationality component. One could also appeal to the supposedly irrational or muse-like quality of creativity simpliciter to argue that intellectual creativity cannot be deliberately cultivated or taught. Given the received view that virtues, including intellectual virtues, arise at least partly

54  Jason Baehr through a process of practice and habituation, this might be viewed as grounds for denying that creativity of any sort can be an intellectual virtue. But this objection is no more forceful than the claim that, say, careful observation cannot be an intellectual virtue because its operation is parasitic on that of cognitive faculties the basic functioning of which lies well outside the scope of rational judgment or control (i.e. we don’t choose whether to have visual or auditory experiences). Rather, in the case of both intellectual creativity and attentiveness, the trait in question builds upon, informs, guides, and “infuses” with rationality one or more cognitive faculties whose default mode of operation is or can be entirely natural or brute. Apropos of the question of whether intellectual creativity can be cultivated or taught—by contrast with the suggestion that it is a mere cognitive talent or aptitude that persons are simply born with (or without)—it is worth considering what form this process might take. While this issue can only be dealt with very briefly here, my suggestion is that, if one were to regularly engage in the following sorts of practices over an extended period of time, it would not be unreasonable to expect some growth or progress along the creative dimensions described above (these activities could easily be modified as practices a teacher or parent might undertake to help his students or children experience similar progress): • Learning about the lives, activities, and accomplishments of creative “exemplars.” • Surrounding oneself with creative people—people who will stimulate and inspire one’s own creative impulses and efforts. • Frequenting creative environments or institutions (e.g. museums or art galleries). • Spending time learning about or interacting with creative objects (e.g. artworks, theories, technologies), studying and admiring their creative features. • Creating time and opportunities for “free” thought, reflection, or experimentation. • Practicing wondering and asking questions. • Practicing “perspective-switching” or thinking about issues from multiple perspectives or standpoints. • Practicing noticing interesting but subtle details and making meaningful but subtle connections between different objects, experiences, or ideas. • Cultivating the technical skills necessary for competent performance in whatever creative domain one is interested in (e.g. brush technique for a painter, logic for a philosopher, higher math for a scientist, etc.). • Learning more about the creative process, for example, by reading some of the many books or other resources that shed light on what creativity is or how it comes about.

Intellectual creativity  55 Of course, the effect of such activities on a person’s cultivation of ­intellectual creativity ultimately is an empirical matter. Nevertheless, while these practices are unlikely to transform a “naturally uncreative” person into a paragon of intellectual creativity, it does not seem unreasonable to think that if pursued intentionally, thoughtfully, over an extended period of time, and in relation to the sorts epistemic activities and contexts discussed above, they might result in at least some meaningful growth in this virtue, at least for many people. By drawing attention to ways in which creativity can be actively pursued and practiced, these activities also lend further plausibility to the idea that creativity can be an intellectual virtue.

Conclusion I began this chapter by noting that I intended to identify a single concept of creativity that (1) is present in ordinary and theoretical conceptions of creativity and (2) fits well with a familiar view of the structure of an intellectual virtue. I proceeded to sketch an account of “intellectual creativity.” According to this account, intellectual creativity involves “organizing a given set of elements” in a way that reflects certain “new or unexpected possibilities” identified by the creative person and instantiates a type of value proper to the creativity activity in question. Put simply, it involves the creation of something new and valuable on the basis of a creative insight. Moreover, as intellectual creativity, it involves engaging in such activity within the epistemic domain, that is, in the context of pursuing or transmitting epistemic goods. In addition to possessing the kind of skill just noted, an intellectually creative person must also be motivated to use this skill in the service of epistemic ends, this motivation must have an intrinsic element, and it must be accompanied by certain corresponding affections (e.g. enjoyment of creative activity). Finally, intellectual creativity involves an element of practical judgment or rationality: a person who possesses this virtue has a good sense of when it should be exercised, in what way, for how long, etc. This account clearly and straightforwardly conforms to the four-dimensional structural model sketched earlier in the paper. As such, the trait it describes can be viewed as an intellectual virtue on par with other intellectual virtues. The account also makes sense of several intuitive judgments about creativity (viz. the judgments in (1)–(8) above) and several additional theoretical considerations drawn from philosophy and psychology.44 We may, then, affirm a positive response to the question posed at the outset of this chapter. Creativity is an intellectual virtue; or, more precisely, there is a reasonably familiar form of creativity that is plausibly considered an intellectual virtue. While virtue epistemologists have paid relatively little attention to creativity, this inattention appears to be unwarranted.45

56  Jason Baehr

Notes 1 For recent treatments, see Battaly (2008), Roberts and Wood (2007), and Baehr (2011). 2 For instance, it does not appear on the lists of intellectual virtues found in Montmarquet (1993: viii–ix, 23), Roberts and Wood (2007: 7, ch. 3), Zagzebski (1996: 21, 114), or Baehr (2011: 1–2). Zagzebski does offer some extended discussions of creativity, which suffice to show that she thinks of it as an intellectual virtue. However, she does not probe its nature or structure in much depth. And, in fact, what interests her most about creativity are the ways in which it seems not to conform to her model of intellectual virtue (see esp. pp. 123–5, 182–3). Similarly, in my previous work (2011), I include creativity in an overall taxonomy of intellectual virtues (21) and briefly discuss whether it conforms to my own model of intellectual virtue (106–8), but do not give it nearly the treatment that I give other virtues like open-mindedness and intellectual courage. 3 See Zagzebski (1996: 168–76) and my (2011: Ch. 6). 4 For relevant discussions, see Balkin (1990: 29) and Kieran (2014a: 209–14). 5 See Schaffer (1994). 6 See Kieran (2014b: 142–3) and Gaut (2014a). 7 See Craig and Deretchin (2010). 8 For similar views, see Kaufmann (2003), Csikszentmihalyi (1996: 25), and Balkin (1990: 29). 9 I develop this model at length in my previous work (2015). Here, I offer only a brief overview. The model overlaps with the account of “thinking dispositions” in Ritchhart (2002). As I explain in my previous work (2015), the model also appears to enjoy broad implicit acceptance within much of virtue epistemology. 10 See my previous work (2011: Ch. 8). 11 See, for example, Zagzebski (1996), Roberts and Wood (2007), Montmarquet (1993), and Baehr (2011). 12 For a development of this point, see my previous work (2011: 99–102). 13 See Perkins and Tishman (2001). 14 For more on this point, see Roberts and Wood (2007: 305). 15 See Balkin (1990: 29–30),Young (1985), Gaut (2014a: 272), and Audi (this volume, p. 25). 16 While this point is widely embraced in the philosophical and psychological literature on creativity, there are difficult questions surrounding the sense in which the products of creativity must be “new” and related putative features of creativity. For more on these issues, see Gaut (2010: 1039–41; 2014: 272), Kieran (2014a: 204; 2014b: 126), Kaufman (2003: 237–9, 241–7), Mumford (2003: 110), Young (1985: 82–6), Nickerson (1999: 393–4), Boden (this volume, pp. 177–79), and Audi (this volume, p. 26). 17 See Balkin (1990: 30), Gaut (2010: 1039–41; 2014: 272), Kieran (2014a: 204, 228–9), Niu and Sternberg (2002: 272), Young (1985: 86–7), (Nickerson 1999: 392–3), Runco and Jaeger (2012: 92), Boden (this volume, pp. 179–81), and Audi (this volume, pp. 26–7). 18 Below I will have more to say about the relevant type of value. 19 See, Niu and Sternberg (2002: 272–3), Stokes (2014), Gaut (2010: 1034, 1042–4), and Audi (this volume, pp. 35–7). As Gaut discusses, a classic treatment of this issue can be found in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, esp. sections 43–50. 20 See Balkin (1990: 30). 21 See Csikszentmihalyi (1996: 28) and Ward, Smith, and Finke (1999: 194–5). 22 See Zagzebski (1996: 123–5) and Gaut (2012: 259–60). Gaut traces this way of thinking about creativity to discussions in Plato’s Ion and Phaedrus. A similar view can be found at 22c in Plato’s Apology. 23 See Kieran (2014a: 208–9), Shaw (1994), Csikszentmihalyi (1996: chs. 3, 5), and Audi (this volume, p. 37). 24 As will become clear momentarily, the skill dimension of intellectual creativity is a complicated matter. As a result, I will have to leave several important questions largely unexplored. 25 For a related discussion of the skill (or ability) component of creativity, see Gaut (2014a: 272–3). For more on the point that creativity is domain-specific, see Gardner (1994: 145).

Intellectual creativity  57 26 The importance of “new” possibilities is straightforward. The addition of “unexpected” is due to the fact that creativity can manifest in, say, discoveries that the creative person or onlookers think is new but in fact is not (in which cases the discoveries are still unexpected). For more on these issues, see sources in note 17 above. 27 For partially overlapping accounts of the cognitive dimension of creative ability, see (Balkin 1990: 30), Ward, Smith, and Finke (1999), and Csikszentmihalyi (1996: 28). 28 For a similar view, see Rhodes (1961: 305, 309) and Csikszentmihalyi (1996: 77). This feature of the account also goes some way toward accommodating an anti-luck condition on creativity defended in Gaut (2014a: 272–3). On the present view, a creative “product” (i.e. a product the coming-to-be of which manifests creativity) cannot emerge accidentally from a person’s creative activity. Rather, it must be a “reflection” of the creative person’s insight, which in turn is a kind of skill or ability. Accordingly, it makes sense to say, on the present view, that the coming-to-be of creative products must be attributable to the skills or abilities of a creative person (i.e. must not be a matter of luck). 29 For an overview of different ways in which this evaluative dimension of creativity has been conceived of by psychologists, see Runco and Jaeger (2012). For related views, see the works referenced in note 17 above. 30 For a helpful discussion of some of these points, see Audi (this volume, pp. 30–1). 31 For an example that illustrates this kind of possibility, see the discussion of Darwin in Csikszentmihalyi (1996: 80–1). 32 For relevant discussions of creativity and intrinsic motivation, see Mumford (2003: 112), Amabile (1996), Niu and Sternberg (2002: 272), Csikszentmihalyi (1996: 113), Kieran (2014b: 128–33; and this volume, pp. 82–4), and Gaut (2014a: 272, 2014b). 33 For a more in-depth discussion of this issue, see my (2011: Ch. 6). 34 See, for example, Driver (2003). 35 See my (2011: Chs. 6–7). For a similar view, defended in relation to an account of moral virtue, see Adams (2006). 36 My view here appears to figure somewhere between Kieran’s (2014b: 136–40) and Gaut’s (2014b). I maintain, in apparent contrast with Kieran, that there is a sense of “intellectual virtue” according to which intrinsic motivation is neither necessary nor sufficient for the possession of such. However, like Kieran and in contrast with Gaut, I maintain that there is a different but equally viable concept of intellectual virtue according to which an element of intrinsic motivation is essential. 37 It is worth emphasizing here that virtue-possession is a matter of degree. Hence, the point is that a person cannot possess the virtue of intellectual creativity (as it is being conceived of here) in its fullness absent certain affective dispositions. Again, this is consistent with the existence of, say, a different but viable reliabilist conception of intellectual virtue according to which the possession of affective dispositions is unnecessary. 38 See sources in note 23 above. 39 Csikszentmihalyi remarks: “Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake” (1996: 75). See also Kieran (2014a: 208–9) and Shaw (1994). 40 This is distinct from the question of whether creative persons tend to be depressed or otherwise unhappy. To the extent that they do, this need not bear one way or another on whether they find the creative process difficult in the ways just indicated. For a discussion of creativity and “ill-being,” see Kieran (2014a; and this volume). 41 See Balkin (1990: 30). 42 The discussion of creativity in Zagzebski (1996: 123–5) suggests that, while perhaps not irrational, creativity typically functions arationally or outside the purview of rational control. For discussions of this and related issues, see Gaut (2012: 259–63) and Kieran (2014a: 209–14). 43 See, for example, Csikszentmihalyi (1996) and Weisberg (2006: Ch. 4). This is consistent with the further plausible idea that creative activity can become a matter of “second nature” or that intellectual creativity can take the form of a “habit of mind” cultivated over time and through practice and repetition.

58  Jason Baehr 44 The one intuitive judgment that appeared to pose a problem for the account was (7), which underscores the muse-like quality of creativity. However, we saw above that at least on one natural understanding of this quality, it can be accommodated by the present account of intellectual creativity. 45 Thanks to Steve Porter for enjoyable and illuminating conversations about the central topic of this chapter during its initial drafting. And thanks to Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran for helpful feedback and suggestions on a penultimate draft.

References Adams, R. (2006) A Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Amabile, T. M. (1996) Creativity in Context (Boulder, CO: Westview). Baehr, J. (2011) The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Baehr, J. (2015) “The Four Dimensions of an Intellectual Virtue,” in Moral and Intellectual Virtues in Western and Chinese Philosophy, eds. Chienkuo Mi, Michael Slote, and Ernest Sosa (New York: Routledge), pp. 86–98. Balkin, A. (1990) Music Educators Journal 76/9, pp. 29–32. Battaly, H. (2008) “Virtue Epistemology,” Philosophy Compass 3, pp. 639–63. Boden, M. A. (ed.) (1994) Dimensions of Creativity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press). Craig, C. J. and L. F. Deretchin (eds.) (2010) Cultivating Curious and Creative Minds: The Role of Teachers and Teacher Educators (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield). Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996) Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: HarperCollins). Driver, J. (2003) “The Conflation of Moral and Epistemic Virtue,” Metaphilosophy 34, pp. 367–83. Gaut, B. (2010) “The Philosophy of Creativity,” Philosophy Compass 5/12, pp. 1034–46. Gaut, B. (2012) “Creativity and Rationality,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70/3, pp. 259–70. Gaut, B. (2014a) “Educating for Creativity,” in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, eds. Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 265–87. Gaut, B. (2014b) “Mixed Motivations: Creativity as a Virtue,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 75, pp. 183–202. Kaufmann, G. (2003) “What to Measure? A New Look at the Concept of Creativity,” Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 47/3, pp. 235–51. Kieran, M. (2014a) “Creativity, Virtue and the Challenges from Natural Talent, Ill-Being and Immorality,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 75, pp. 203–30. Kieran, M. (2014b) “Creativity as a Virtue of Character,” in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, eds. Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 125–144. Monmarquet, J. (1993) Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield).

Intellectual creativity  59 Mumford, M. D. (2003) “Where Have We Been, Where Are We Going? Taking Stock in Creativity Research,” Creativity Research Journal 15, pp. 107–20. Nickerson, R. S. (1999) “Enhancing Creativity,” in Handbook of Creativity, ed. R. Sternberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 392–430. Niu, W. and R. Sternberg. (2002) “Contemporary Studies on the Concept of Creativity: The East and the West,” Journal of Creative Behavior 36/4, pp. 269–88. Norton, C. E. (ed.) (2011) William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job: With Descriptive Letterpress, and a Sketch of the Artist’s Life and Works by Charles Eliot Norton (Amazon Digital Services LLC). Perkins, D. and S. Tishman. (2001) “Dispositional Aspects of Intelligence,” in Intelligence and Personality: Bridging the Gap in Theory and Measurement, eds. Janet Collis and Samuel Messick (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum), pp. 233–57. Rhodes, M. (1961) “An Analysis of Creativity,” The Phi Delta Kappan 42/7, pp. 305–10. Ritchhart, R. (2002) Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get It (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass). Roberts, R. and J. Wood. (2007) Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Runco, M. A. and G. J. Jaeger. (2012) “The Standard Definition of Creativity,” Creativity Research Journal 24/1, pp. 92–6. Schaffer, S. (1994) “Making Up Discover,” in Dimensions of Creativity, ed. M. A. Boden (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), pp. 14–51. Shaw, M. (1994) “Affective Components of Scientific Creativity,” in Creativity and Affect, eds. Melvin Shaw and Mark Runco (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation), pp. 3–43. Stokes, Dustin. (2014) “The Role of Imagination in Creativity,” in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, eds. Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 157–84. Ward, T. B., S. M. Smith, and R. A. Finke. (1999) “Creative Cognition,” in Handbook of Creativity, ed. R. Sternberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 189–212. Weisberg, R. (2006) Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc). Young, J. G. (1985) “What Is Creativity?” The Journal of Creative Behavior 19, pp. 77–87. Zagzebski, L. (1996) Virtues of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

4

Creativity and knowledge Katherine Hawley

A recurring theme of philosophical writing about creativity is that there is not enough of it (the philosophical writing, that is). Creativity is an important, valuable feature of human activity, often discussed beyond the bounds of philosophy, and yet it is relatively under-studied within our discipline. In seeking to remedy this lack, it is natural, sensible, and fruitful to look to the philosophy of mind and of cognitive science, and to aesthetics, as well as to look beyond philosophy as it is usually understood. In this chapter, I propose to explore a number of respects in which epistemology too can contribute to our philosophical understanding of creativity. Both knowledge and creativity involve achievements of different kinds, and from that point of contact we can build a number of useful analogies.

Creativity and value The concept of creativity involves concepts from the family of novelty, originality, and surprise. There is significant variation within this family: for example, “original” seems more complimentary than does mere “novel”. But I won’t dwell upon that variation here; moreover, like others, I will take it that creativity requires doing something which is new or original to the agent, rather than achieving something unprecedented in human history. Instead, I will focus on a further question: does the concept of creativity also involve the concept of value? Many theorists have thought so, defining creativity such that creative products must be valuable. These include, influentially, Margaret Boden (2004: 1). In his review of the field, Gaut writes “There is a broad consensus that creativity is the capacity to produce things that are original and valuable” (2010: 1039), though he acknowledges that there are exceptions to this broad consensus. More recently, Gaut (this volume) articulates a more complex connection between creativity and value, whilst Hills and Bird (this volume) are sceptical about the supposed link. What is the motivation for including a value condition on creativity, i.e. for denying the possibility of valueless creative products? It is of course true that products which are both creative and valuable are worth

Creativity and knowledge  61 pursuing: a creative solution to a global medical challenge trumps a creative solution to the challenge of keeping my sock drawer tidy. Educational programmes which aim to enhance creativity should focus on directing such creativity towards valuable goals, just as programmes which aim to enhance stamina, critical thinking, or teamwork should focus on directing those traits towards valuable goals. (It is an empirical question how easy it is to train people to develop skills for admirable purposes, without thereby enhancing their ability to turn the force towards the dark side.) But we are not tempted to posit a conceptual connection between stamina, or teamwork, and the pursuit of valuable goals. Why is creativity different? Perhaps it seems artificial to separate the quest for originality from the quest for value: what makes creative pursuits so challenging, and so rewarding, are the ways in which they require us to balance the free-form push for originality with a reflective assessment of the value of what we generate. But the same is often true in the quest for knowledge. Seemingly, not all knowledge is worth having, and investigative pursuits—such as academic research or crime detection—require us to balance the search for truth with an assessment of the value of what we discover. Again, we are not tempted to think that being worth knowing is a necessary condition for knowledge: there is plenty of practically useless knowledge. Likewise, it seems, we could value valuable creative products without making value a necessary condition for creativity. One central motivation for linking value and creativity is the claim that merely original (or merely novel) products can lack creativity, and that such products lack value. Gaut (2010: 1039) attributes to Kant the view that whilst “original nonsense” is novel, it is neither creative nor valuable. Hills and Bird (this volume) dispute both the attribution and the view itself. This is a form of argument from intuition, which is appropriate, given that we are trying to establish conceptual connections: we are to imagine or consider something original yet nonsensical, and then agree that it is neither creative nor valuable. Some caution is required, since Kant predates Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” and Edward Lear’s delightfully creative “nonsense” verse. Such products are valuable not despite their nonsensicality but because of it; similarly, comedians such as Ross Noble make a high art out of seemingly spontaneous “nonsense”. Probably, Kant would not have enjoyed a Ross Noble gig, but if we are attempting to capture our ordinary concept of creativity, then the work of Carroll, Lear, and Noble is paradigmatic, not borderline. For the purposes of this debate, when imagining “original nonsense” we should imagine something which genuinely lacks any sense, rather than something which is comprehensible but entertainingly daft. For example, we might imagine arbitrary strings of words and letters, or the equivalent in other media. As Berys Gaut has suggested (personal communication), someone might simply decide to write down every letter

62  Katherine Hawley or numeral that occurs to her over the course of ten minutes, without ­following any algorithm, or attempting any sense. How are we to decide whether such a product is creative, and whether it has value? We can test our intuitions as to whether such a product has moral value, practical value, or aesthetic value, and if we get the details of the story right, we can conclude that it does not. I personally find it more difficult to generate intuitions about whether such a product can count as creative, i.e. as something which reflects positively on its author’s creativity. But that is often the way with contested philosophical analyses, where one can lose track of one’s intuitions about crucial cases. I want to explore a different approach to this issue. There are various ways of thinking about the connection between the value of a product, and the creativeness of that product, where the latter is understood in terms of its counting positively towards the creativity of its producer. We might think that it is the value of the product, along with its novelty or originality, which helps make it creative. Conversely, in the case of “original nonsense”, it is the valuelessness of the product which supposedly prevents it from counting as creative. Alternatively, we might think of the creativeness of a product as endowing it with value, and the noncreativeness of “original nonsense” as preventing it from having value. Either way, we might regard the creativity and value of a product as flowing from some common source, most plausibly from the manner in which the product is generated by its creator. We don’t need to see this as a dispute over some deep fact of the matter in order to appreciate that keeping these various options in mind can help us open up some alternative ways of thinking about creativity and value. I propose to explore this area by drawing on some parallels with epistemological debate about the value of knowledge. This is a promising strategy, not because epistemologists have reached consensus about what such value amounts to, but because the volume of work in that area provides ample opportunities for creative borrowing.

Epistemic value Let’s begin with the Meno problem. Since Socrates’s discussion of the road to Larissa, epistemologists have attempted to understand the ways in which knowledge of some matter seems superior to mere true belief in that very same regard. After all, a true belief about the way to Larissa seems just as useful a means of getting us to Larissa as is knowledge of the way to Larissa. Nevertheless, we seem to attribute greater value to knowing, over and above merely having a true belief. A more recent lesson, from Gettier (1963), is that, in addition, we value knowing more than we value merely having a justified true belief.

Creativity and knowledge  63 When we consider the diligent but hapless people in Gettier’s examples, who hold justified beliefs which only happen to be true, our judgement seems to be not just that they lack knowledge, but that this is some kind of defect: it’s better to know. We can use the term “epistemic value” as a placeholder for the value which knowledge seems to have, over and above the value attached to the satisfaction of its various necessary conditions such as justification or truth, or combinations thereof. (Pritchard and Turri 2014 is an overview of current debate about epistemic value; Olsson 2013 is a useful annotated bibliography; Kvanvig 2003 is an influential critique.) What kind of value is epistemic value? That’s a much-disputed matter, because none of the straightforward answers is obviously true. For example, epistemic value does not seem to be mere practical value. Prima facie, true belief can get us to Larissa just as well as knowledge can. And we seem to value knowledge over mere true belief even where neither has any practical value: whether you consider your favourite example of “pure” academic enquiry, or else your favourite example of celebrity trivia, the standard distinctions between really knowing and merely getting it right seem to apply, as do the standard distinctions between really knowing and merely having justified true belief. It’s better, though no more useful, to know, than to believe in a way which falls short of knowledge. Moreover, epistemic value does not seem to be moral value. In some cases, there is clear moral disvalue in my knowing something, perhaps because I will use my knowledge to evil ends, or perhaps because someone else had a right to my not knowing that fact. In such cases, it’s clear that knowing is not morally better than truly believing. Could knowing be morally worse than merely truly believing? This is a bit harder to establish, but certainly when you find yourself with a belief about someone else’s private business, it’s often proper to avoid obtaining further evidence in that regard; it seems morally better to stick with mere belief, rather than pursuing knowledge. There is plenty of room for disagreement here. But we don’t need an agreed ethics of belief and knowledge in order to appreciate that, even where it is morally better not to know, there still seems to be some epistemic sense in which knowledge trumps mere true belief. And, of course, there are many situations in which both knowledge and true belief are morally neutral, yet knowledge seems more valuable. This does not entail that the value of knowledge is some kind of sui generis value, something which cannot ultimately be understood in terms of other forms of value; indeed, various epistemologists have proposed different ways of understanding what epistemic value might be. But it is enough for my purposes that none of these accounts is just obviously correct.

64  Katherine Hawley

Creative value The literature on epistemic value suggests a way of connecting creativity and value: we might understand a product’s being creative as itself a source of value, not obviously reducible to other forms of value. To motivate this, consider that we often seem to admire the creativeness of a product over and above its other positive features: a creative solution to a medical challenge is in some sense more admirable than a non-creative solution to the same important challenge. This is not because the creative solution is inevitably more novel or original, either locally or globally, than the noncreative solution: after all, novelty can be the result of sheer accident, of non-agential processes, or of a quasi-mechanical process whereby options are systematically exhausted. Let us use “creative value” as a placeholder term for what seems to differentiate a genuinely creative product from one which is merely novel, just as we use “epistemic value” for what seems to differentiate genuine knowledge from other states such as mere justified true belief. I do not propose a reductive account of the nature of creative value, any more than I propose a reductive account of epistemic value. But I will explore the analogy in some detail. What kind of value is creative value? Prima facie, it does not seem to be practical value: a non-creative solution to a medical challenge can be just as effective as the creative solution to the same challenge. Analogously, mere true belief can be just as effective as knowledge, when we want to travel to Larissa. And we can distinguish creative from non-creative products even where both are practically useless; compare a folly on a nobleman’s estate which ingeniously fits around a jagged rock formation with a standard folly built in a flat woodland clearing. Likewise, if you look around the seminar audience, you will see both creative and non-creative doodling, both seemingly without practical value. Moreover, creative value does not seem to be identical to moral value. Cropley (2017) distinguishes negative creativity, which has unintended bad consequences, from malevolent creativity, where the bad consequences are intended. Negative creativity might include the scientific and technical creativity required to generate new theories, experiments and technologies, even where these unforeseeably result in a worsening of climate change or of economic inequalities. Examples of malevolent creativity are commonplace: liars can be very creative in their deceit, whilst the inventive criminal or Bond-style evil genius is a familiar figure. (Cropley usefully reviews research in this area, whilst Kampylis and Valtanen 2010 examine various definitions of creativity with this issue in mind). As discussed above, knowledge may be morally neutral, or morally bad, even whilst retaining its epistemic value relative to mere true belief (or

Creativity and knowledge  65 mere justified true belief). There are some things I morally ought not to know. Similarly, in cases of malevolent creativity, it is morally impermissible to pursue an evil project, either creatively or non-creatively. But this is compatible with the claim that creatively realised evil has a creative value which mechanically or fortuitously generated evil lacks. There is little temptation to identify epistemic value with aesthetic value, although it’s not uncommon for scientists and mathematicians to take aesthetic value as indicative of truth (as discussed in fascinating detail by McAllister 1999). But it is a bit more tempting to identify creative value with aesthetic value, or at least to consider it a species of aesthetic value. The obvious challenge here is that creative value can be found in domains far beyond those normally thought of as the homes of aesthetic value: there can be creativity in science, sports, problem-solving, business, and so on. Conversely, aesthetic value seems to extend beyond the realm of human creativity, encompassing natural beauty for example. The connection between aesthetic value and creative value is evidently not straightforward, yet it seems worthy of further exploration; I will not pursue that project here however. The notion of creative value enables us to draw distinctions between creative products and non-creative products, even where these seem to have equivalent practical and/or moral value, as when we value the creative over the non-creative solution to a medical challenge. Moreover, we may distinguish creative and non-creative products even where both seem to lack other kinds of value. This makes conceptual space for the classification of “original nonsense” as creative, even if it is valueless in other ways. But it does not require us to make that move if it is independently unappealing, or incompatible with whatever we might eventually want to say about the sources of creativity. We can distinguish knowledge from mere true belief, or from mere justified true belief, even where the subject matter is utterly inconsequential, rendering the knowledge valueless along non-epistemic dimensions. So there are some suggestive parallels between the value of knowledge and the value of creative products. Thus one way of understanding the value condition on the creativity of products is in terms of creative value. We can accept that malevolent creativity, creative nonsense, and standardly positive creative products all share a special kind of creative value, despite their varying along other dimensions of value. This is a beginning rather than an end to enquiry in this area, since I have not offered anything like a substantive account of creative value. The natural thought is that creative value attaches to novel products in virtue of their being generated by an appropriately creative process, but this only pushes us one step further. Should we expect to find any substantive account of creative value? As I have framed matters, the task of understanding what it is for a

66  Katherine Hawley product to be creative as opposed to merely original is analogous to the task of u­ nderstanding what it is for a mental state to count as knowledge as opposed to mere true belief, or mere justified true belief. This task is famously challenging, as reflected in the post-Gettier literature with its stacks of failed analyses of the concept of knowledge. In light of this, many have been attracted to Williamson’s “knowledge-first” programme which rejects the idea of analysing knowledge (Williamson 2000). Others have developed a variety of approaches to knowledge which prioritise either our methods of acquiring and sustaining belief, or else the intellectual character and dispositions of the belief-former. These models are suggestive of a similarly diverse array of approaches to theorising creativity; I make only a small start on exploring these below. But there are also some obvious differences between creativeness and knowledge. Although originality or novelty is playing the “truth role” in this analogy, originality is not truth. Moreover, a far wider range of entities can possess originality, as compared to the narrow range of entities (propositions, and, derivatively, beliefs) which can possess truth. Thus, the range of entities which might potentially possess creative value is far wider than those which might possess epistemic value, and perhaps this will make it even more difficult to provide a substantive account of how creative value is generated. In addition, the types of feature which differentiate knowledge from mere true belief, or from mere justified true belief, are not the same as those which differentiate a creative product from a merely original or novel product. For example, we can frame the difference between knowledge and mere true belief by focusing on the ways in which knowledge seems to preclude luck. Approximately speaking, if your belief is true only as a matter of luck, given the way that you acquired it, then it does not qualify as knowledge; to render this claim less approximate would require careful investigation of the varieties of epistemic luck (Pritchard 2005). In contrast, an element of luck seems to be compatible with genuine creativity, even congenial to it. The notion of serendipity seems relevant, and indeed epistemologists’ work on the nature of luck in their domain may be a source of insights here. Yet, despite these different levels of luck tolerance, there is an underlying structural similarity: too much luck and too little skill seems incompatible with genuine creativity as opposed to mere accidental originality. This reflects the fact that both knowledge and creativity can be understood as types of achievement, albeit different types.

Value and virtue Following our path into the literature on epistemic value, it becomes clear that the nature and source of such value is often regarded as pivotal in

Creativity and knowledge  67 debate between epistemological reliabilists and virtue theorists (Olsson 2013). Reliabilists take knowledge to be true belief which has been arrived at through a reliable process; the reliability of a belief-forming process is a matter of its tendency to produce true, rather than false, beliefs. There are internal challenges for reliabilists, who must explain how best to individuate processes, set thresholds for reliability, and so on. But in addition, according to Linda Zagzebski (2004) and others, reliabilists’ core focus on truth generation leaves them unable to explain why we value knowledge more than mere true belief. Zagzebski invites us to consider a good cup of coffee which has been produced by a machine which reliably produces good coffee, and to compare it with a good cup of coffee which has been produced by a much less reliable machine, one which occasionally produces good coffee, but more often produces watery rubbish. It is clear that the reliable machine is more valuable (to coffee-lovers) than is the unreliable machine. But, argues Zagzebski, when the unreliable machine does manage to produce a good cup of coffee, that cupful is just as good as the cupful produced by the reliable machine. A cup of coffee is not itself rendered more valuable by its having been produced by a reliable machine, because the reliable machine is valuable only in virtue of the value of good coffee. Or, to use the standard terminology, the value of a good cup of coffee “swamps” any value associated with the machine’s tendency to produce good coffee. Analogously, a reliable belief-forming process derives its value from the value of true belief, just as a reliable coffee machine derives its value from the value of good coffee. And, so the argument goes, a true belief is no more valuable for having been generated by a process which reliably produces true beliefs. The value of the true belief swamps the value of the process, leaving us seemingly unable to understand why knowledge has more value than mere true belief; this challenge to reliabilists is known as the “swamping problem”. Now imagine a “creativity reliabilist”, who argues that a creative product is one which is not merely original, but is generated by a process which reliably produces original products (a creativity reliabilist may sensibly require a lower degree of reliability than does her epistemic counterpart). Creativity reliabilism faces its own swamping problem. The difference between a merely original product and a creatively valuable product is a matter of the processes by which each was produced. But it is difficult to understand why there is any additional value—over and above the value of originality—in having been produced by a method which reliably generates original products. The value of originality in the product swamps the value of the originality-generating process.

68  Katherine Hawley Zagzebski and others have seen in virtue theories a resolution to the epistemic swamping problem. Zagzebski (2004) suggests that we should understand knowledge as true belief that is obtained through the exercise of the agent’s intellectual virtues, in ways which mean we can attribute credit to the agent for this achievement. Creditable true belief, true belief obtained through the exercise of intellectual virtue, is more valuable than mere true belief—or so Zagzebski argues. Thus, virtue epistemologists argue that they have an advantage over reliabilists in understanding the nature of epistemic value. In the case of creativity, the analogous suggestion would be that we should understand the creative value of a product as tied to its having been generated through the exercise of the agent’s creative virtues, in ways which mean that we can attribute credit to the agent for her creative achievement. Creditable original work, original work generated through the exercise of creative virtue, would thus be more valuable than merely original work. Independently of these considerations, Matthew Kieran (2014) theorises creativity as a character virtue, one which requires more than a tendency to generate products of an appropriate kind. For Kieran, the exemplary creative person has intrinsic motivation, and is not driven primarily by desires for money or fame. It is not clear whether Kieran thinks that products generated by such exemplary, virtuously creative people are themselves more deeply creative, or more valuable, but he does argue that “other things being equal, the intrinsically motivated person will often be more reliably creative than the extrinsically motivated person,” (2014: 143) i.e. will more reliably generate original, valuable products. So for Kieran, exemplary creativity involves both an admirable achievement, and, as a matter of empirical fact, greater reliability. Of course, Kieran develops sophisticated arguments of his own in favour of this view of creativity. But consideration of the swamping problem provides further support for a virtue account, support which does not depend upon the empirical claim that the virtuously creative person will in fact be a more reliable generator of original work. If Zagzebski is right about epistemic value and virtue, then likewise it seems that we can understand the ways in which virtuously generated creative products are more valuable than those produced merely by reliably novel methods: the value of the creative product exceeds that of the non-creative product, even when each is produced by an equally reliable method of generating novelty or originality. Perhaps inevitably, it is controversial whether virtue epistemologists have the upper hand with respect to epistemic value; Kvanvig (2010) puts forward the sceptical case. But my point here is not to establish the

Creativity and knowledge  69 superiority of a virtue approach to creativity, rather to recommend investigation of the analogous options on display within epistemology.

Creative value and creative failure The notion of creative value may do further philosophical work, by helping us to understand different types of “creative failure”, and their corresponding types of success. Paradigm creative success involves the generation of a valuable, creative product, but we can fall short in various ways. Suppose that, bored of my usual stir-fry pork and vegetable dinner, I add chopped banana to the usual ingredients, and the result is novel but disgusting; I fail to create the kind of delicious new dish I was aiming for. The dish lacks culinary value, and indeed it lacks one of the key features I was targeting, edibility. So there is a clear sense in which I have failed, and fallen short of my aspirations. But perhaps there is another sense in which I have successfully managed to act creatively: I have generated a novel product, through the sensitive use of my skills and dispositions. We can see this situation as analogous to an epistemic enterprise in which I set out to discover something exciting, or financially valuable, but instead gain knowledge of some boring, financially worthless facts. There is a clear sense in which I have failed, and fallen short of my aspirations: I didn’t discover anything which was useful to me. But in another sense I have succeeded: I gain knowledge, with its corresponding epistemic value, in a way which a virtue epistemologist would regard as personally creditable. Suppose instead that I set out to cook more creatively not by adding novel ingredients, but by combining the usual ingredients in an unusual order. I follow my plan, rather than slipping back into my usual habits, yet the result is the same old dish, since with this type of cooking, at my level of culinary skill, it makes little difference how one orders the ingredients. I have generated something which has culinary value (it’s perfectly edible), but it is not original, and thus does not qualify as creative. The epistemic analogue would be a situation in which I follow generally reliable belief-forming processes in a responsible fashion, but through bad luck end up with a false belief (recall that originality plays the “truth role” in the analogy between creative and epistemic value). In such a situation, I have everything which is usually needed for epistemic value, except for the central desideratum, truth, and thus I lack knowledge. If the analogy is good, then in the cooking case the creatively produced but ultimately boring stir-fry lacks creative value, even though it has been produced in an admirable fashion. A third type of failure: suppose that I again set out to cook more creatively but find myself just using my usual ingredients in the usual order,

70  Katherine Hawley because I get distracted, or because I lose my nerve when I contemplate adding either chopped banana or raw pork to cooked vegetables. Here, it seems, I have failed to cook more creatively, even though I successfully prepare a perfectly edible dinner. What I produce has culinary value, being both nutritious and tasty, but it lacks creative value, having been generated by an uncreative process. My failure here is a matter of failing to exercise whatever creative virtues or skills I may possess. As with discussion around the swamping problem, there is plenty of scope for disagreement here about how best to think of creative value, and the ways in which we can achieve creative success and creative failure, with or without a virtue-theoretic picture as backdrop. But again there seems to be plenty of opportunity for exploring in greater depth the nature and structure of creativity, and the relationship between creative agents, creative processes, and creative products, by drawing on resources from the epistemology literature.

Epistemic injustice and creative injustice In this final section, I explore a further area in which epistemology can enrich the philosophy of creativity, and vice versa. This concerns the ethics and politics of our practices of recognising creativity and knowledge, in others and in ourselves. In her important book (2007), Miranda Fricker develops the notion of “epistemic injustice”. Epistemic injustice can take various forms (e.g. those explored by Dotson 2011), but central to Fricker’s book is that of testimonial injustice. This arises when someone’s knowledge or honesty is unfairly underestimated because of an audience’s prejudices about her social identity, for example her race, gender, or social class. Thus, the speaker’s testimony—through which she offers her knowledge to others—is not given the respect it deserves. (Kidd, Medina, and Pohlhaus 2017 is a detailed and extensive guide to current debate in this area.) Many aspects of testimonial injustice are connected to the fact that in standard cases of testimony the audience is not able to judge directly whether what the speaker says is true, but must instead rely on features of the speaker and the conversational situation in order to make an implicit estimation of credibility. After all, if the audience already knew the facts of the matter, they would not be seeking testimony in this regard. As Bernard Williams puts it in a different context (1970: 146), the audience for testimony is in the “inquirer’s situation”, attempting to identify someone who knows, without already knowing oneself. This contrasts with the “examiner’s situation” we often default to in epistemology, whereby we assume the truth of what someone believes, then ask whether she is secure or justified enough to count as “knowing”.

Creativity and knowledge  71 In my previous work (2011), I explored some relevant differences between our judgements of others’ purported theoretical knowledge, as when we rate someone as a testifier, and our judgements of others’ purported practical knowledge. When we seek others who know how, we may be in the inquirer’s situation, wishing to acquire know-how ourselves (Craig 1990 refers to this as the “apprentice” situation). We may occasionally be in the examiner’s situation, wishing to test or certify someone else’s skills in an area where we ourselves are already skilled. But often we are in a third type of situation: we do not know how, but we can directly recognise know-how in others. For example, even if I do not know how to make delicious profiteroles, I can recognise someone who does have this know-how, by sampling what she bakes. Compared to testimonial injustice, the attempt to evaluate others’ practical knowledge makes available new opportunities for epistemic injustice (or justice), whilst at the same time making other forms of epistemic injustice less likely in this arena. In particular, when we assess others’ knowledge, we need to make judgements both about the success of their actions (how good their profiteroles are) and about the extent to which that success is due to their exercise of know-how, as opposed to mere luck or accident. Unfair social stereotyping may make us oblivious to others’ successful actions, especially in complex situations. But in addition, we may unfairly tend to attribute acknowledged success to luck or perhaps sheer effort, as opposed to skill or knowledge-how. For example, in studies involving simulated job applications, psychologists Biernat and Kobrynowicz (1997) found that women as compared with men and black people as compared with white people “must work harder to prove that their performance is ability-based”. These distinctions and concepts provide a framework for understanding some of the difficulties we face when attempting to judge creativity in others or indeed ourselves. Several judgements need to be made: we need to assess the products both for originality, and for the creative value, in whichever way we understand that to be connected to the creative virtue or skills of the agent, as opposed to luck, circumstance, or mechanically running through the options. It’s not hard to see how preconceptions about social identities, such as gender or race, could play an explicit or implicit role in these judgements about both originality and “appropriate” sourcing in virtue, skill, even genius; this kind of “creative injustice” is territory well explored by feminist aestheticians (e.g. Battersby 1989). Just as we distinguish the truth of a belief from its full-blown status as knowledge, potentially for unjust reasons, we may distinguish the originality of a product from its full-blown status as creative, again potentially for unjust reasons. Moreover, the same opportunities for misjudgements—whether or not these depend on social identities—arise when we try to make judgements about the value and nature of our own attempts at creativity. The creative

72  Katherine Hawley arts are a prime breeding ground for “impostor syndrome” (Sakulku and Alexander 2011 review scientific evidence for what psychologists refer to as “impostor phenomenon”). People prone to impostor feelings take an over-critical attitude to their own supposed achievements, often in the face of seemingly “objective” measures of external success, together with positive feedback from those around them. Anecdotally, they fear being found out or discovered as an impostor, someone who does not deserve the accolades or rewards she receives for her work. Some directly doubt the quality of what they have managed to produce: its originality, or fittingness for purpose. But others are prone to an over-attribution of their successes to luck, or sheer effort, rather than to the kind of skill we associate with creative virtue. Again, the analogies we can draw with epistemology, and the distinction between successful action and knowledgeable action, provide some conceptual scaffolding for our thinking about these problems.

Conclusions Creative products are not items of knowledge, or at least they are not straightforwardly and exclusively items of knowledge, whilst the skills and virtues central to being a creative agent are not simply identical to those central to being a good epistemic enquirer. Nevertheless, the fact that we think of both knowledge and creativeness as achievements of an agent, achievements with inherent value and social currency, opens up a whole range of structural analogies between the two, and thus the potential for philosophers of creativity to take advantage of work already done by epistemologists. Is there also some potential for epistemologists to take advantage of existing work in the philosophy of creativity? I have not explored that question in this chapter. But no doubt there are opportunities for epistemologists to benefit in this way, sparking both knowledge and creative ideas.

Acknowledgements My work on this chapter was supported by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, which I gratefully acknowledge. I am also grateful to the editors, Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran, for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft.

References Battersby, C. (1989) Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Biernat, M. and Kobrynowicz, D. (1997) “Gender- and Race-Based Standards of Competence: Lower Minimum Standards but Higher Ability Standards for Devalued Groups,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72.3: 544–57.

Creativity and knowledge  73 Boden, M. (2004) The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2nd ed., London: Routledge. Craig, E. (1990) Knowledge and the State of Nature, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cropley, D. H. (2017) “The Dark Side of Creativity: Previous Research and New Avenues,” in Bathelt, H., Cohendet, S., Henn, S. and Simon, L. (eds.) The Elgar Companion to Innovation and Knowledge Creation, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Press, in press. Dotson, K. (2011) “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia 26.2: 236–57. Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaut, B. (2010) “The Philosophy of Creativity,” Philosophy Compass 5.12: 1034–46. Gettier, E. (1963) “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?,” Analysis 23: 121–23. Hawley, K. (2011) “Knowing How and Epistemic Injustice,” in Bengson, J. and Moffett, M. A. (eds.) Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind and Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 283–99. Kampylis, P. G. and Valtanen, J. (2010) “Redefining Creativity: Analyzing Definitions, Collocations and Consequences,” Journal of Creative Behavior 44.3: 191–214. Kidd, I. J., Medina, J. and Pohlhaus Jr, G. (eds.) (2017) The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, London: Routledge. Kieran, M. (2014) “Creativity as a Virtue of Character,” in Paul, E. S. and Kaufman, S. B. (eds.) The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 125–44. Kvanvig, J. (2003) The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kvanvig, J. (2010) “The Swamping Problem Redux: Pith and Gist,” in Haddock, A., Millar, A. and Pritchard, D. (eds.) Social Epistemology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 89–112. McAllister, J. (1999) Beauty and Revolution in Science, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Olsson, E.J. (2013) “Value of Knowledge,” Oxford Bibliographies Online, DOI:10. 1093/OBO/97801953965770008. Pritchard, D. (2005) Epistemic Luck, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pritchard, D. and Turri, J. (2014) “The Value of Knowledge,” in Zalta, E. N. (ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 edition), https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/spr2014/entries/knowledge-value/. Sakulku, J. and Alexander, J. (2011) “The Impostor Phenomenon,” International Journal of Behavioral Science 6.1: 73–92. Williams, B. (1970) “Deciding to Believe,” reprinted in Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williamson, T. (2000) Knowledge and its Limits, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zagzebski, L. (2004) “Epistemic Value Monism,” in Greco, J. (ed.) Ernest Sosa and His Critics, Oxford: Blackwell, 190–98.

5

Creativity, vanity and narcissism Matthew Kieran

1 Introduction Creativity matters. Many of humankind’s greatest achievements are the upshot of creativity. Education systems and organizations (allegedly) seek to cultivate creativity, while politicians and governments implement policies to facilitate it. Millions of human beings make choices that are only rational given that being creative is highly prized. From academics, scientists, artists, musicians and engineers to business people and the world of work, creative fulfillment is integral to the lives of many. Traditionally, philosophical work has tended to focus on defining creativity, the key processes or faculties involved and value questions. I will just assume here that an action is creative if it involves someone’s abilities and judgement in appropriate ways that issue in something new and valuable (Gaut 2010: 1040). Elsewhere, I have argued for a new approach that puts character centre stage, in particular arguing for a virtue theoretic approach to exemplary human creativity and what it is to be a creative person (Kieran 2014a and b). What follows is the development of a new challenge to such an approach. The challenge arises from the putative recognition that a degree of narcissism and vanity promotes people’s creativity. If so, the challenge goes, then the virtue theoretic approach to exemplary human creativity either cannot be right or becomes far less attractive in so far as the personal vice of vanity is a creative strength. Independently of how forceful the challenge is, addressing this in detail will force us to examine the nature of vanity and its implications for creative character in some detail. The first section will briefly elaborate the virtue theoretic approach to creative character and the nature of the challenge. Once the conceptual landscape has been laid out we will look at evidence for thinking that creative people often tend toward vanity and then go on to develop a new account of just what vanity is which helps to explain why this might be so. With this in place, we can then explore the putative benefits and costs of vanity for creativity. This will then allow us to address the challenge head on. It will be argued that while vanity may appear to be a creative strength, in reality it turns out to be a creative vice. Nonetheless, it will be argued that vanity is a particularly interesting creative vice since it is a close cousin

Creativity, vanity and narcissism  75 to creative virtue. Raising and addressing the challenge will cast new light on vanity, creative character and associated claims (both within philosophy and more broadly). Practically speaking, we should find out whether or not promoting creativity must or should come at the apparent cost of encouraging narcissism and vanity.

2 A virtue theoretic approach to creative character and the challenge Here is the basic picture (Kieran 2014a and b). If we want to realize our creative potential, and more reliably achieve new, surprising and more worthwhile things, then the best way to do so is to cultivate creative virtues. Virtues are admirable traits that more reliably enable greater, more worthwhile creativity. It takes courage to take certain risks, resilience to cope with failure, persistence to go on in the face of difficulties, and curiosity to question things and explore uncharted territory. Thinking in terms of creative virtues gives us both an explanation of key causal mechanisms that enable us to be more creative and makes sense of evaluative attitudes toward creative people’s achievements, underperformance and failings. While we admire people’s creative courage and curiosity, we often regret (and sometimes condemn) creative cowardice, timidity and incurious acceptance of current orthodoxy. Creative vices are disadmirable traits that explain creative failure, underperformance and misdirection. In addition, I take it that being a creative person is either a partial constituent of or one of the multiple realizers for a good, flourishing, fulfilling life. The conception of creative virtue fits with various models of virtue more generally (Aristotle 1976; Hume 1975; Zagzebski 1996; Swanton 2003). However, exactly what the challenge from vanity amounts to partly depends on the conception of creative virtue at issue. It might pose a particular problem if we assume creative virtues should be unified or consistent with moral virtue (Kieran 2014 b: 223-229). If the conception is entirely instrumentalist (Driver 2001), shorn of the admirability requirement, then vanity in principle could straightforwardly be a creative virtue if it promotes creativity. If the conception is entirely one of personal worth (Baehr 2011), independent of outcome, then even if vanity promotes creative achievement more than anything else it would still remain a vice (assuming vanity is disadmirable). The idea that vanity could be a creative strength rather than a weakness is a challenge in so far as it threatens to prise apart the twin aspects of a) excellence or admirability and b) what best enables the realization of greater, more worthwhile, more reliable creativity. Independently of the challenge, looking at vanity’s relation to creativity has wider significance. First, addressing the challenge will involve giving a new characterization of the nature of vanity. Second, examining vanity’s

76  Matthew Kieran relation to creativity will involve explicating not just when, where and why it appears to benefit creativity, but coming to understand the fundamental costs of creative alienation and imprudence that vanity brings with it. If we are not careful, it might seem like vanity is a creative cost worth paying. If the argument below is on the right lines, then this is not so. Vanity really is a creative vice or weakness. Nonetheless, if the argument is right, then vanity is also the least harmful and most amenable of creative vices (or weaknesses). It is a creative vice that is in principle easily turned toward and cultivated into creative virtue.

3 Vanity Fair It is hardly a new or startling observation to note that creative people often seem particularly given over to vanity. The self-ascription of vanity amongst creative people is pretty common. Leo Tolstoy characterized his own creative motivation as being driven by “vanity, self-interest and pride” (1983: 18). George Orwell identified his first motivation in Why I Write (2000: 3) as “sheer egoism” going on to characterize serious writers as being more vain and self-centered than most. In a similar vein, Sylvia Plath held that “writers and artists are the most narcissistic people” (Orr 1966: 171). The biographies, case studies and testimonies about creative people across every domain are littered with excesses of self-aggrandizement and self-admiring conceit. To take a case in point, Steve Jobs would talk about himself in boastful, grandiose terms, had a particular penchant for comparing himself with Leonardo, and falsely claimed credit for ideas, patents and achievements. It comes as no surprise in the authorized biography to learn that Tina Redse, a close expartner and friend to Jobs who works in mental health, thinks Jobs perfectly matched the criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (Isaacson 2011: 266). A similar theme of vanity emerges in John Richardson’s vivid portraits of modernist masters and the wider cultural scene knowingly entitled Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters (2011). Grandstanding and self-conceit are far from confined to the creatively successful. The creatively ambitious who meet with little apparent success can be just as prone to over-claiming and selfglorification. Adam Rounce’s study of failed writers from the latter part of the eighteenth century shows self-conceit and the feverish pursuit of reputation to be just as common amongst the less than successful (sometimes with painful results). Percival Stockdale’s vanity was so piqued at the success of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets that he embarked on a mammoth rejoinder, thirteen years in the writing, which, rather sadly, met with deserved indifference and served only to underscore Johnson’s creative achievement. As one critic put it, “Mr. Stockdale is entitled to the same sort of gratitude which we feel to a dull landlord who has invited us to dine with an interesting visitor” (Rounce 2013: 183).

Creativity, vanity and narcissism  77 It is also worth considering our own experiences. If you work in a domain where people strive to be creative – whether it be music, literature, academics, engineering or business – consider some of the behavior you have witnessed and, possibly, your own. It is not uncommon to see people boasting, grandstanding, name dropping, posing, over-claiming credit or significance, checking out citations, reviews, overreacting to criticism, savouring praise, feuding with others, over-sensitively reacting to not being talked about and acting resentful at not being invited to events or conferences. In more extreme cases, people have been known to re-edit their Wikipedia entries in vain, glorious, puffed-up terms and post self-glorifying reviews of their own work anonymously on Amazon. No doubt many of us might tend to over-attribute vanity to others whilst underestimating our own. Yet, the quiet pangs of disappointment at a bad critical review or not being referred to in some article along with pleasures taken in praise or adulation may be glimmers of a vanity that lies within. In addition to first-person experience, testimony and historical case studies, there is a body of work in psychology that claims there are significant links between narcissism and creativity. Narcissism, whether pathological or sub-clinical, is typically characterized by a grandiose sense of self-importance, high self-belief, and the seeking out of attention and admiration (Campbell and Miller 2011). Raskin (1980) found a small yet significant positive relationship between creativity and narcissism. In particular, those who scored highly on both self-reported creativity and test measured creativity tended to score much more highly for narcissism than other subjects. This is consistent with more recent work. Narcissists tend to score much more highly than normal subjects for self-reported creativity ( Jonason, Potter and Richardson 2015) and score higher in creative achievement (Furnham 2013). Whilst evidence concerning creative achievement or performance is more mixed (Goncalo, Flynn and Kim 2010) than for self-reported creativity (which is hardly surprising given vain people will likely report themselves as more creative than normal), variability in the creative performance of narcissists might be explained in terms of self-enhancement opportunities. Wallace and Baumeister found that subjects low in narcissism performed no differently whether they faced a high or a low self-enhancement opportunity whereas “narcissists consistently performed better when high performance would be selfenhancing than when it would not be” (2002: 830). Narcissists “performed relatively poorly when feedback would be known only to themselves, but they outperformed everyone else when the feedback was anticipated to be made public. These findings suggest that narcissists are mainly motivated to win the admiration of others rather than prove something (in this case creative ability) to themselves” (2002: 831).

78  Matthew Kieran In what follows we will see just why the psychological evidence for ­vanity enhancing actual creativity is, at best, mixed and, moreover, why vanity tends to operate positively, where it does so, only in light of opportunities for a particular kind of self-enhancement.

4 The nature of vanity What is vanity exactly and how might it be related to creative ambition? It is central to the notion of vanity that, in some sense, the vain think too much of themselves. According to some, vanity “seems to consist almost entirely in a person’s having an excessively high self-estimation” (Tiberius and Walker 1998: 383). Yet, self-overestimation need not be a function of vanity and, at least as a conceptual matter, vanity need not involve self-overestimating beliefs. Whilst there is a non-contingent association between vanity and self-overestimating tendencies, it is consistent with being vain that self-estimating beliefs are justified and true. Steve Jobs may have been vain about his creative abilities and vision, yet the relevant beliefs might well have been justified and true. Vanity as a matter of principle is consistent with having justified, true, high self-estimations though this may rarely be the case as a psychological matter. Thus, whilst it is a necessary condition of vanity that the relevant self-related beliefs must involve high self-estimation they need not be unwarranted (though they typically are for reasons which remain to be accounted for). The high self-estimating beliefs must be with respect to something that is construed as valuable, admirable or praiseworthy in some respect or an indirect reflection of or relation to such. Whilst this may be a truism, it is worth reflecting on why this should be. Roberts and Wood characterize vanity as “an excessive concern to be well regarded by other people, for the social importance their regard confers on oneself ” (Roberts and Wood 2010: 237). Yet, vanity need not be concerned with or driven by social importance. What matters to the vain is the seeking and the getting of praise, adulation or esteem from others (Nuyen 1999: 616) since, as Taylor puts it, “the vain offer their appearance as a means of seducing others into thinking well of them, which in turn is a means of seducing themselves to think well of themselves” (Taylor 2006: 72). Vanity seeks and delights in self-glorification (which typically is though need not be concerned with social significance). Ordinary delight in praise is to be distinguished from delighting in praise as an apprehension of the self as being or appearing highly admirable or praiseworthy. It is one thing to have the thought ‘how nice it is to do something that others value’ or ‘how pleasing that others value what I do’. It is quite another to think ‘others value what I do’ where you are foregrounding yourself as the object of your appreciation.

Creativity, vanity and narcissism  79 The drive to appreciate the self as glorified, esteemed or ­praiseworthy is fundamental to vanity. Whilst Narcissus admiring his own reflection is a stereotypical depiction of vanity, this might not be quite right. Narcissus, after all, did not realise that he was looking at his own reflection. There is no faintly self-conscious (or even subconscious) awareness in Narcissus’ admiration of the face that he sees as his own. He was admiring his own beauty, true enough, but he was neither admiring his own beauty as his beauty nor was the admiration subconsciously driven by this recognition. The content of Narcissus’ admiration is not selfglorifying in the manner constitutive of vanity. Yet, it is no accident that vanity is often represented by figures looking at their self-reflections (as Narcissus is). It is not just that a common self-conscious object of vanity is someone’s physical appearance as beautiful or desirable. It is because vanity involves seeking out or presuming an audience, even if that is only oneself, God or some hypothetical, idealized audience. It is not just that “vanity is typically [my emphasis] selective of an audience” (Roberts and Wood 2010: 238), but rather, that vanity is essentially so. Vanity necessarily involves apprehending the self as one’s self who is, could or would be highly appreciated by some implied audience and savouring that as the object of appreciation. To bring this out, consider a contrast between arrogance and vanity. Arrogance need know nothing of how the self appears to others and may care not a jot. Hence, arrogance is often bound up with indifference, complacency or contempt with respect to others. The arrogant may become angry when others are less than deferential or do not recognize their presumed superiority or entitlement qua human being (Tiberius and Walker 1998: 382). Yet, the arrogant need not (and typically do not) dwell on or savour their self-image as admired or admirable to others. Arrogance presumes what vanity delights in. Vanity, by contrast, always addresses itself to an implied audience given that what matters is appreciation of the self as glorified. Vanity is thus necessarily indexed to an implied audience in a way that arrogance is not. Vanity seeks approval, praise, admiration or esteem (even if at its most removed this is only appreciation by the self of one’s self). Hence, the truly vain often spend a lot of time and effort foregrounding themselves to others in the best light possible and tracking the extent to which others do or do not respond to them in such a light. Vanity seeks and savours applause and admiration whilst arrogance presumes itself straightforwardly entitled to or above such matters. If the above is right, then there are three basic elements constitutive of vanity: high self-estimate underwriting the sense of self as deserving glorification, the desire for self-glorification and appreciation of the self as glorified (or glorifiable) by an implied audience. Thus, we can arrive at a new, more formal characterization of vanity as follows:

80  Matthew Kieran A person is vain to the degree that features playing a causal role in someone’s judgements, responses or actions are driven by, along with concomitant rationalizations, the desire for gratification in apprehending the self as glorified – combined with a conception of the self as deserving of appreciation as glorified (partly constituted by high self-estimation) – via the elicited or solicited appreciation or esteem of an actual or idealized implied audience. It is worth foregrounding certain advantages arising from this definition. It is not enough to be vain to be so motivated since the vain must also apprehend themselves as glorified. The characterization also explains why we often take self-glorification to be indicative of vanity – because it appears to be vain – whilst recognizing that this is not necessarily so. Furthermore, the motivation for delighting in the glorifying appearance of the self explains both i) why those who are vain tend to have grandiose thoughts, imaginings and fantasies about themselves and ii) why the vain typically solicit the esteem of others for themselves since this is taken to track and reinforce the glorifying appearance of the self as it is delighted in. Indeed, given the centrality of delighting in the self as glorified, the characterization captures the sense in which vanity is addressed to an implied audience whether this be actual or idealized others, the self or God. Lastly, whilst it is not constitutive of vanity as such that it involves self-overestimation, we can explain why vanity of its nature tends toward self-overestimation. The desire for self-glorification provides the rule under which the vain person is disposed to act. The vain seek to focus on and draw attention back to themselves in self-glorifying attention-seeking ways. This explains why we associate a cluster of tendencies with vanity such as compliment seeking; boastfulness; self-glorifying exaggeration; over-claiming knowledge; valued relations; responsibility for achievements; over-sensitivity to praise and criticism; focusing on comparative recognition; the magnification of small differences in self-promotion; an overemphasis on tracking praise, esteem and esteem indicators that seem to self-glorify; and directing the gaze of others to such. As vanity gives rise to a drive to reify whatever appearance most glorifies the desired self-apprehension, this gives rise to a defeasible tendency toward self-deceptive self-overestimation.

5 Vanity and creative endeavour If the characterization of vanity is on the right tracks then we are in a position to generate – consistent with and partly explained by appeal to the above characterization of vanity – distinct but inter-related empirical hypotheses which could capture why those who are or who strive to be creative (or at least some subsection thereof) might be especially susceptible to vanity. By way of background, we should bear in mind that in being

Creativity, vanity and narcissism  81 or seeking to be creative someone is aiming at doing something not just worthwhile but new. Creative people thus achieve something comparatively distinctive which naturally tends to garner praise or esteem. (I)  Vanity as causing creative endeavour: To the degree that someone is vain, he looks for self-glorifying ways in which he can or can appear to be – to some relevant implied audience – esteemed or esteem worthy. In many domains, being creative is highly valued and certain domains are highly valorized as creative domains. Hence, vanity may play a causal role in people aiming for creative activity and domains. Now, as Adam Smith suggests at one point, productive purpose and the pursuit of ambition, achievement, acquisition and pre-eminence in general may often be driven by vanity (Smith 2002[1759]: 61). But is there any particular pull to being creative given non-creative success elsewhere, say as a lawyer or broker, is highly regarded? Here are some possible reasons to think so: a) the high prestige seems more unique to the creative person b) the self-glorification available is not so easily comparable with (or discounted by the success of) others c) there is often an explicit link to – and socio-institutional structures supporting – finding actual audiences and d), at least in the arts, the creative material can be all about the self. (II)  Creative endeavour as expressing and amplifying vanity: To the degree that someone is or appears to be creative, then her (apparent) creative activity affords more means for her to manifest or express her vanity to some relevant implied audience. What it is to be (or appear) creative is – amongst other things – to do (or appear to do) something that is comparatively new and worthwhile. In being creative, someone can express and amplify the qualities which she believes underwrite the high self-regard she has for herself and, in so doing, facilitate the solicitation of the esteem of others in self-glorifying ways. In other words, where someone is being creative i) she has more outlets for expressing or manifesting her vanity and ii) being creative in certain ways may amplify the signalling strength or expression of someone’s vanity. Creative endeavour as leading to the (III)  acquisition and cultivation of vanity: To the degree that someone is (or appears to be) creatively successful, and highly praised or flattered as special in glorifying ways that are conditional upon, construed as or internalized as linking someone’s creative achievement to their specialness, then this may cause someone’s natural delight

82  Matthew Kieran in the esteem of others to develop into vanity. Creative gifts, roles and achievements (or the appearance of such) can garner much praise, admiration and flattery in ways which do or can be taken to glorify the creative person. This is often linked to – or construed as being dependent upon – the ‘specialness’ of the person concerned. Where someone consistently meets with large amounts of high praise for being special and receives indicators of such in many different forms then this may cause the creative person to become vain (even though this was not the case before). More succinctly put, being on the receiving end of flattery for creative gifts or achievement may lead to the acquisition or cultivation of vanity.

6 Vanity as a creative strength? The thought cannot be that wherever there is greater vanity there is evergreater creative advantage. The very phrase ‘vanity project’ is often used to pick out pretty worthless, ridiculous and disastrous work resulting from excessive self-regard. Where vanity is radically unhinged from contact with reality, it often leads to disaster or, if not disaster, a waste of time and effort. Nonetheless, setting vastly delusional judgement aside, a degree of vanity may be creatively adaptive. Inflated self-estimation of abilities, for example, can lead people to set themselves high targets to aim at (or at least higher than they would otherwise do so). In virtue of doing so, they may thus be more likely to aim at something more creatively worthwhile if they are orientated to what is creatively valuable and prepared to persevere. Moreover, in setting themselves at harder, more difficult problems the vain may be more likely to work at the edge of their creative capacities and thus, in so far as they persevere, more likely to skill themselves up. Similarly, inflated self-estimation often leads people to take greater risks. In part, this may be because the inflated self-estimate in vanity gives rise to blindness about and underestimation of some risks or because vanity tends toward more highly valuing the rewards of risk taking (Foster, Shenesey and Goff 2009; Foster and Brennan 2011) where that kind of success is construed in a self-glorifying light. Hence, vanity may sometimes act as a spur to embark on more creatively ambitious projects and activities. Moreover, at least where the vain judge it likely they will be exposed to the relevant implied audience, they may be more motivated to persevere in the face of failures or setbacks and thus overcome creative challenges. This is consistent with findings suggesting those registering more highly for narcissism may outperform others where they know the results will be public (Wallace and Baumeister 2002). Vanity, at least under certain circumstances, can act as a creativity enhancer for creative development and achievement.

Creativity, vanity and narcissism  83 It is crucial to bear in mind that the inflated self-estimation bound up with vanity is constrained and shaped by the desire for self-glorification with respect to an implied audience. What this means is that, where activity is visible to and judged as worthwhile by the relevant implied audience, to the degree someone is vain he may well tend to persevere and strive to a high degree. The vain person will also be highly averse to (visible) failure or anything that threatens to undermine self-glorification and, where such arises, will tend to redouble their efforts in order to compensate. Where creative endeavour and achievement depends upon perseverance or fortitude in the face of failure then, where visible to the relevant implied audience or a threat to self-glorification, a degree of vanity may put someone at an added advantage (at least where what is being pursued is apprehended in terms of worthwhile glory). Moreover, given that the desire for self-glorification with respect to an implied audience is the motivation which gives the rule to how the vain person acts, to the degree someone is vain she will tend to pay close attention to what is esteemed by the relevant implied audience. This in turn might lead to becoming more discriminating about the values, norms and judgements of the relevant implied audience. In so far as this is true, she may tend to be good at anticipating what the implied audience will value or esteem as surprising, new and valuable. In other words, vanity may aid greater tracking and discrimination about what will likely be esteemed as creative. How adaptive this is with respect to true creativity will depend upon the presumed judgements and dispositions of the implied audience. It will hardly provide a great creative boon if someone is more attuned to anticipating what the judges on the X Factor will admire. However, if someone is attuned to anticipating the judgements and dispositions of an implied audience which has some kind of track on what is genuinely creative, then vanity to that extent might seem to confer a genuine advantage. The vain person may thus be systematically more discriminating about and attuned to anticipating what will likely be taken as creatively worthwhile.

7  A new challenge? To the extent the above seems right, then we may have a new challenge to the virtue theoretic approach to creative character. Vanity, commonly thought of as a personal vice, sometimes enables people to be more rather than less creatively successful. A degree of vanity, at least where relevant to the implied audience and self-glorifying self-image, can seem to give rise to higher, more ambitious task setting, higher self-set creative expectations, creative risk taking, perseverance and the discriminate seeking out or anticipation of creative projects likely to be well received. This seems at odds with a virtue theoretic account of exemplary human creativity that holds

84  Matthew Kieran the aspects of admirability and the promotion of greater, more reliable, more worthwhile creativity. The problem is, though, that whilst vanity is a disadmirable trait, it sometimes seems to enable greater creative achievement. Independently of addressing the challenge itself, what follows is of much wider interest. We will find out just how fundamental vanity’s creative misguidance is. Vanity may tend toward various types of creative problems including anxiety or psychic depletion where performance fails to live up to the glorifying self-image. Yet, vanity’s most fundamental, problematic errors are tendencies towards creative alienation and imprudence.

8  (Un)Creative alienation from others In most creative domains we rely heavily upon collaboration and cooperative activity. Even where collaboration seems far from central, we typically depend on broader co-operative activity. Even single authors, for example, commonly rely upon co-operative norms and practices in the development of their creative work. Most authors seek feedback, appreciate good editors and listen to (some) criticism. This requires co-operation and the presumption of co-operative reciprocity is built into many related practices. Even authors renowned for their individuality or splendid isolation often turn out to rely heavily on at least a few others in the process of creative honing and refinement. To take just one example, Raymond Carver relied heavily for the development of his style and form on his editors, Gordon Lish and Tess Gallagher. So much so that when Carver’s original, unedited versions of some short stories were published, Giles Harvey claimed, “it has only inadvertently pointed up the editorial genius of Gordon Lish” (Harvey 2010). Even where vain people are charismatic – since grandiosity combined with solicitousness for your interest can be a powerful combination – in so far as vanity tends toward grandstanding and self-involvement the appeal tends to wear off (at least at close quarters over time). Vanity is not something people tend to find particularly attractive. Nonetheless, the deeper creative problem with vanity is that it tends to corrode co-operation and collaborative activity – even when people are strongly committed to so working and it is in the creative self-interests of all to do so. Inflated self-estimation guided by the desire for glorifying approval from others tends toward self-aggrandizement. Thus there is a tendency to focus on, foreground, exaggerate and over-claim with respect to things that garner esteem or admiration (Paulhus, Harms, Bruce and Lysy 2003; Tracy, Chenge, Robins and Trzesniewski 2009; Wallace 2011). Over time, this will tend to be corrosive of the trust required for collaborative creative relationships to work effectively and, at least to the extent that co-operative activity is at close quarters, anything more than fairly minimal co-operation. How so?

Creativity, vanity and narcissism  85 Features of vanity and narcissism such as grandstanding, disagreeable responses and praise or blame shifting (Wallace 2011) often play a role in co-operative breakdowns. Such behaviour naturally tends to lead to puzzlement, disappointment and resentment from others. Yet, even where this is not so, whilst vain people may at first impress to the extent they foreground over-claimed knowledge and abilities, over time the ways in which the vain fall short will become apparent. The recognition that the vain person does not know or is not capable of doing what was claimed may start to become all too apparent. A vain person will come to seem unreliable at least to those who are well motivated. Actually, it is not so much that the vain are unreliable, but rather that they are reliable in the wrong kind of way. They will also tend not to work at commitments that are invisible to or fail to garner the esteem of the relevant implied audience. This is problematic at least where part of being committed to working collaboratively or co-operating in the right kind of ways involves putting effort in as required, even where it is not visible to others (never mind garnering esteem). Depending on the psychology of those involved a vain person’s tendencies may thus prompt others to withdraw from collaborative and closely co-operative activity or prompt conflict. Either way, the vain person will tend to seek whatever reinforces or serves their self-conception as admired or admirable. Such strategies may range from pacifying solicitousness to diversionary aggression or outright apology. Even where an apology is forthcoming, the nature of the apology may well tend to focus on the vain person at the expense of the injured party and be excusing rather than contrite. Over time, at least where people have a choice, this gives further reason for others to withdraw and only engage in minimally co-operative behavior given the assumption that the vain person is not to be trusted. Even in cases where people cannot wholly withdraw – due to work organization or power relationships – co-­operation will tend to be much more minimal, partial or contingent than it would otherwise have been. Two complicating factors are worth bearing in mind. First, what selfglorifying manoeuvres the vain person pulls and indeed exactly how so will depend upon whose esteem she is seeking in self-glorifying. What exactly is taken to self-glorify will depend upon the vain person’s conception of what she takes the relevant audience to esteem. Second, how vanity manifests itself within collaborations and inter-personal co-operative activity will depend upon how the vain person conceives of the relevant relationships. The kind of difficulties that arise between a vain person and presumed inferiors as contrasted with near equals will often be rather different from those that arise between a vain person and presumed superiors whose esteem and applause is desired.

86  Matthew Kieran Vanity thus tends to make creative friendships, collaboration and close co-operation a fraught process – and tends to undermine them in the long run. This is prudentially speaking a bad thing for the vain person – to the extent that developing and realizing creative potential depends upon these things. This is not to say that vain people cannot achieve creative heights. Other people often put up with abuse or exploitation by highly creative people and strive to make such relationships manageable. What many people put up with from Steve Jobs in comparison with what they would normally put up with from anyone else is an eye-opener (Isaacson 2011). Nonetheless, there is a natural tendency for such relationships to implode. Moreover, to the extent creative people are vain, they will have a natural tendency – when things do go wrong – to blame those they were collaborating with or external factors. Where there is a repeating pattern of such relationships, as can be seen from the Steve Jobs biography, the vain will tend not to be critically aware enough to see themselves as the issue except in so far as the repeating pattern is diagnosed in self-glorifying ways. To take a case in point, Morrissey’s autobiography, in the words of one critic (Gill 2013), “is a heavy tome, utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability. It is a potential firelight of vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness … a humiliation constructed by the self-regard of its victim.” Whilst the judgement seems overly harsh – the narrative does possess warmth, insight and even likeability in parts – Morrissey’s vanity seems to explain a grand litany of falling out with labels, managers, musicians, fans and music journalists – often ones who time and time again seem to have gone out of their way to accommodate him – and manifests both inflated self-belief and aggrandizement. Any problems or shortfallings nearly always seem to be allegedly down to the stupidity, vulgarity, indifference, insensitivity and talentless fault of dullard judges, fellow band members, music press journalists or fans - never his own – whilst all triumphs seem to have been achieved despite everyone else rather than partly facilitated by them. Now, it may be that some are tempted to deny this is really a problem vanity causes for creativity per se. Vanity may turn out to be a social vice, but it may be thought that creativity is not inherently a social activity. This seems perverse given that creative development and the most isolated creative activities typically depend on all sorts of co-operative norms and practices. Nonetheless, it is true that certain kinds of creative activity are not especially collaborative. Poets, painters, authors, landscapers, mathematicians and composers, for example, often work as loners (though not nearly as much as we might think) and their creative activities can perhaps be pursued in splendid isolation. Moreover, even where creative activities require co-operation or collaboration, at least where the vain are in positions of power or dominance, others may be prepared to co-operate enough for

Creativity, vanity and narcissism  87 the vain to pursue their creative ambitions. Various star architects, chefs, academics or entrepreneurs may have assistants who make huge allowances for them. Where vanity seems to give certain adaptive advantages, in prudential terms at least, foregoing long-term creative trust in collaboration or co-operation may seem like a cost worth paying. This may help to explain why in domains associated with an individual star system vanity may be far more prevalent. Nonetheless, despite appearances, as we shall see, vanity most fundamentally tends towards creative imprudence.

9  Creative imprudence It might be thought that, creative co-operation aside, given the putative creative benefits outlined above people’s vanity serves their creative selfinterests. However, as we shall see, vanity not only often pulls away from the best kind of creativity and creative development, but leads to creative imprudence. In so far as people’s vanity leads to the overestimation of the nature of what they have achieved, their role in such and what they are capable of doing well, vain people will naturally tend to overreach themselves. It is all too easy for vain people to set themselves at creative ambitions that they are badly placed to realize. Moreover, vanity will tend to be blind to certain risks, underestimate others and overvalue certain kinds of rewards given the grandiose self-image and implied audience involved. Thus, it is that vanity will have a tendency to set people up to fail and give rise to what may turn out to be a huge amount of wasted creative time and effort. In so far as vain people are guided by the self-glorifying desire for esteem, they will tend to put in hard work only where this is either visible to the relevant implied audience or devoted toward something that it is assumed will eventually be visible to (and esteemed by) them. Even where vanity motivates, it does so by tracking the vagaries of intellectual, artistic or design fashion as indexed to the relevant implied audience. To the degree creative people are vain, they will tend to track what is conventionally approved of and esteemed by the implied audience. Hence, vanity tends toward creative cowardice in seeking conformity toward the values and interests of the implied audience. This explains just why vanity orientates itself toward the least interesting kind of creativity (where it is tracking what is creative at all). The vain will be averse to trying out genuinely new, radical, potentially transformative possibilities, relative to the implied audience. Vanity will tend to track what seems a safe bet for high esteem and, for the vain, the worst kind of risk is losing the esteem of the implied audience or indeed opening up to the possibility of indifference, ridicule and looking downright silly. Taking genuine creative risks often opens up the possibility of losing the kind of self-glorifying self-gratification that

88  Matthew Kieran drives the vain. Vanity, then, explains a lack of truly creative courage in the pursuit of what is really safe in conforming to the expectations of others. The vain seek to show off qualities that will most easily garner praise and adulation. By contrast, the creatively courageous are prepared to try things out which may well be thought likely to meet with incredulity. At least to the extent transformative, radical creativity depends upon trying out the genuinely new and surprising, rather than safely elaborating on that which is most likely to elicit esteem, vanity pulls away from the most significant kind of creativity. Vanity may appear courageous, and no doubt the vain will tend to promote their work more, but by its nature it will tend to be conformist and conventional relative to the relevant implied audience. The vain person will also tend toward close-mindedness in dismissing all too easily the criticism of those who are not part of the implied audience or consider doubtful, where possible, the status of those who are critical (as being part of the true implied audience). In other words, vanity tends to insulate against and lead to the dismissal of criticism as voiced by those perceived not to belong to the implied audience whose esteem and approval is being sought. This is problematic given that – at least sometimes – precisely what is needed to develop creatively is to listen to the worries, objections or points of view of those outside the group one does (or aspires to) belong to. Where criticism and disesteem come from those who belong to the implied audience – and their being so cannot reasonably be put into doubt – then the vain person will tend to be over-sensitive. This helps to explain tendencies either to a) overreact in response to such criticism by trying to realign creative projects or activity in line with the esteem of the relevant group, or b) overreact in dismissing them as thereby showing themselves not to be a group whose esteem is worth soliciting and thereby seeking to realign to some other grouping. This explains why the vain may tend toward certain creative vices in ways that seem inconsistent. The vain can be both overly solicitous of the opinions of others while yet also snobbishly dismissive (Kieran 2010) where there is a mismatch with the sought for self-glorification. Conceptually speaking, vanity need not always produce such errors all the time. However, given what it is to be vain, to the degree someone is vain he will have marked tendencies toward making such mistakes. Vain people expose themselves to the strong possibility of certain kinds of creative failings, misdirection and stunted creative development. They will also fail to possess certain creative virtues, such as true courage, which facilitate and enable the most significant kind of creativity. The problem is compounded where people meet with some degree of early or intense creative success, reward, applause and esteem given a) the multiple functions of esteem indicators and b) that admired success attracts people and systems serving distinct motivations and functions other than tracking

Creativity, vanity and narcissism  89 true worth. As creative success is rewarded with indicators of esteem – or indicators taken as such – this, in turn, can attract people and systems with ends that are orthogonal to tracking true creative worth. Hence, the acquisition and development of vanity may proceed in ways which bring about or reinforce echo chamber effects and an epistemic insulation from the kind of criticism required for creative development. Vanity might be thought of as analogous to a particularly fickle kind of stimulant that can on occasion boost performance likely to be recognized by an implied audience as creative on particular kinds of occasion but – at least over time – will tend toward fundamental creative misjudgment and misdirection. Furthermore, vanity brings with it natural tendencies toward certain other creative vices. The vain seek something, via being creative, which is at best orthogonal to creativity and at worst a problematic rival. Now, seeking praise is far from a bad thing. The trouble is that vanity seeks praise as self-glorifying. In effect, vanity fixes on defeasible indicators of what it is to be, creatively speaking, on the right track in relation to some external goal – that you are glorified as praised or praiseworthy – and then treats those indicators as the goal itself. The fundamental error is that the vain value attitudes of praise or admiration as ends in themselves rather than as, at best, indicators of creative progress or achievement and this, in turn, explains tendencies toward error and misdirection.

10  From vanity as a creative vice to creative virtue Fame and glory are often orthogonal to genuine achievement. Vanity takes indicators of creative success (i.e. attitudes of others such as praise, applause or more indirect cultural esteem indicators) as the end to aim at for the sake of self-glorification. By contrast, the best creative end to aim at just is the end of doing something new that is good or worthwhile, though, of course, this will often involve aiming at something that is esteemed by others. It is true that if we are aiming at something creatively worthwhile, we may sometimes justifiably believe that what we do deserves praise (though not as much as the vain would). Nonetheless, this should be a by-product of the ends exemplary creativity aims at rather than the end itself. Exemplary creativity tends to insulate people from the errors vanity is susceptible to. Why? The creatively virtuous aim to do something new and worthwhile, so concern for garnering esteem as such does not figure directly in their reasoning about what they do. Nonetheless we can explain why vanity may seem, mistakenly, to be a creative strength. It is not just that vanity may sometimes bring apparent creative advantages alongside exposure to significant creative misdirection and failings. It is also that of all the creative vices, vanity may be the closest cousin to creative virtue. As Hume suggests more generally, “vanity is so closely allied to virtue, and to love the fame of laudable actions

90  Matthew Kieran approaches so near the love of laudable actions for their own sake, that these passions are more capable of mixture, than any other kinds of affection” (Hume 2007: 87). More strongly still, as Smith held (Hanley 2009: 104-109; 144–145), vanity is educable from the love of praise toward what is worthy of praise. The vain person who seeks glorification from actual praise can be shown that he will tend to be more creative if he seeks merited praise. Notice that a vain person seeking merited praise could have the same creative behavioural profile as a fully virtuous person. This is one reason why vanity is the closest cousin to creative virtue. The second reason is that the vain creative person who seeks merited praise may be shown it would be better still if he sought doing what is worthwhile rather than aiming directly at self-glorifying esteem. Vanity can thus be harnessed in creative development, via psychological bootstrapping, into the cultivation of genuine creative virtue. No doubt if we are aiming to do something creatively, we do so because we think it is worth doing. To the extent we think something is worth doing – and we have done it well – we may approve of ourselves and enjoy the praise of others (though the creatively virtuous may be more focused on what could or might have been better). Hence creative virtue is consistent with delight in esteem. Nonetheless, creative virtue involves enjoying the praise of a relevant implied audience (where it is enjoyed) as a byproduct of aiming to do something well rather than the end goal itself. Hence, as with Gregor Mendel, Emily Dickinson, Vincent Van Gogh or Vivian Maier, exemplary creative people sometimes pursue self-set creative ends even where their achievement is (at least as yet) unrecognized and unsung. If the above argument is on the right lines, then the apparent challenge to a virtue theoretic approach to exemplary human creativity has been met. In raising and then meeting the challenge, we have seen how and why vanity, when properly understood, may enable creativity in some circumstances, whilst yet undermining it much more fundamentally. Conceiving of vanity as a close cousin to creative virtue captures this kind of relation and shows how we might psychologically leverage vanity into creative virtue. If so then, in both conceptual and practical terms, this is an interesting, significant result that casts new light on the nature of creative character. Creativity not only need not come at the cost of personal vice but vanity itself can be turned toward creative virtue.1

Note 1 Versions of this paper were presented at the Dubrovnik Conference on the Philosophy of Art, the University of Sheffield, the University of Kent, the University of Leeds, the University of Bristol, London Aesthetics Forum, and the European Society of Aesthetics. Many thanks to all those present for helpful questions, comments and suggestions. In addition, many thanks to David Garrard, Bryan Frances, Berys Gaut, Lea-Cecile Salje, Robbie Williams and Jack Woods for helpful discussion or comments on drafts.

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92  Matthew Kieran Kieran, M. (2014b) “Creativity, Virtue and the Challenges from Natural Talent, Ill-Being and Immorality,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 75: 203–230. Nuyen, A. T. (1999) “Vanity,” Southern Journal of Philosophy XXXVII: 613–627. Orr, P. (1966) The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press, and Ian Scott-Kilvery, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Online at http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/orrinter view.htm Orwell, G. (2000) “Why I Write,” in G. Orwell, Essays, London: Penguin. Paulhus, D. L., P. D. Harms, M. N. Bruce and D. C. Lysy (2003) “The OverClaiming Technique: Measuring Self-Enhancement Independent of Ability,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84: 890–904. Raskin, R. N. (1980) “Narcissism and Creativity: Are They Related?” Psychological Reports 46: 55–60. Richardson, J. (2001) Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters, New York: Random House. Roberts, R. C. and J. Wood (2010) Intellectual Virtues, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rounce, A. (2013) Fame and Failure, 1720–1800: The Unfulfilled Literary Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, A. (2002 [1759]) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swanton, C. (2003) Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, G. (2006) Deadly Vices, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tiberius, Valerie and J. D. Walker (1998) “Arrogance,” American Philosophical Quarterly 35: 379–90. Tolstoy, L. (1983) Confession, tr. D. Patterson, New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Tracy, J. L., J. T. Cheng, R. W. Robins and K. H. Trzesniewski (2009) “Authentic and Hubristic Pride: The Affective Core of Self-Esteem and Narcissism,” Self and Identity 8: 196–213. Wallace, H. M. (2011) “Narcissistic Self-Enhancement,” in W. K. Campbell and J. D. Miller (eds), The Handbook of Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Theoretical Approaches, Empirical Findings, and Treatments, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Wallace, H. M. and R. F. Baumeister (2002) “The Performance of Narcissists Rises and Falls with Perceived Opportunity for Glory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82: 819–834. Zagzebski, L. (1996) Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part II CREATIVITY AND VALUE

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6

Creativity without value Alison Hills and Alexander Bird

1 Introduction Among philosophers and psychologists, value is widely regarded as ­essential to creativity alongside the originality of the ideas produced: “There is a broad consensus that creative products and acts must exhibit originality and be valuable” (Gaut and Livingston 2003: 8). “Creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e. original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e. useful, adaptive concerning task constraints)” (Sternberg and Lubart 1999: 3). “What is it to be a creative person? There is a minimal sense according to which it just is to possess the ability to produce novel and worthwhile artefacts” (Kieran 2014). The standard view, therefore, defines creativity as a trait characterized by the disposition or set of dispositions of an individual: 1 To have novel ideas (originality) … 2 which are valuable; or produce objects which are valuable (value). Our aim is to challenge the claim that creativity is valuable because it is essential to creativity that it is disposed to produce objects of value. We reject this claim in Section 2—creativity can produce objects without value of any kind. In Section 3, we examine the widely cited “original nonsense” argument for value in the definition of creativity (attributed to Kant) and find it unsound. We therefore reject the standard view. In our opinion, an improved definition of creativity would reject value but retain originality. To originality we add three related conditions not normally found in definitions of creativity, the most significant of which is imagination. Creativity, in our view, is the disposition or set of linked dispositions of an individual: to have many ideas ( fertility); which are novel (originality) and generated through use of the imagination (imagination); and to carry through these ideas to completion (motivation). These four component elements work together in a creative individual (an individual cannot be thought of as properly creative who sometimes has imaginative new ideas, but when she does so is not motivated to work on them and when she feels motivated,

96  Alison Hills and Alexander Bird cannot have the ideas). Creative acts and products are the manifestations of these ­dispositions. We do not depend on the correctness of our view in rejecting the standard view (that would beg the question). It is nonetheless useful to have a plausible foil to the standard view.

2 Creativity is not essentially disposed towards producing value According to many psychologists and philosophers, our definition of creativity lacks a crucial element: the creative disposition is essentially a disposition to create objects of value. “Creativity involves generation of novelty that deals effectively with a problem or need of an individual or community,” assert Cropley and Cropley (2013: 5). “The need may be concrete, abstract, even spiritual.” Psychologists mostly prefer a two part definition of creativity: originality plus “effectiveness” (Barron 1955; see Runco and Jaeger 2012). “Effectiveness” captures the idea of utility or value—a creative idea should be worthwhile, for example, by solving a problem or meeting a need. Boden (2010: 29) lays down a three-part definition: “Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising, and valuable” but does not defend the inclusion of value. We reject the requirement that what is created has value. First, on the ground that creativity can have wholly negative outcomes. Secondly, because we can recognize an object as being the product of creativity independently of identifying the value in that object. And thirdly, because individuals who imaginatively produce some objects of value, and some objects without value, are most plausibly manifesting the same disposition in so doing: rather than two different dispositions (one to imaginatively produce things of value, one imaginatively to produce worthless things).1 2.1  Creativity can produce objects of no value If creativity is defined as the disposition to produce objects of value, then it ought not to be possible to be creative and to be disposed to produce objects that have no value. We consider three ways in which creatively produced objects might have value and argue that it is possible to exercise creativity in producing objects that have no value in any of these respects. • First, creatively produced objects might have objective value, for instance a creatively produced work of art might have aesthetic value (beauty or sublimity, for instance); a creatively produced scientific theory may have “scientific value” (which may be truth, knowledge, or understanding etc.).

Creativity without value  97 • Secondly, a creatively produced object may valuable in virtue of being good “of its kind.” • Finally, an object might be good in virtue of being good for the individual who produced it. Perhaps it is good for her because it contributes to her well-being, objectively considered; perhaps it is good for her subjectively, because it satisfies her preferences or meets her own standards for her life going well. 2.1.1  Creativity without objective value Discussions of the value of creativity often focus on creativity in particular domains, notably the arts and sciences. Arguably, calling an artist or scientist creative is a term of praise, which implies that the ideas (or artworks, or scientific hypotheses) that they produce through the exercise of creativity are especially good. But creativity is not restricted to the arts and sciences. And it is much less clear—to say the least—that calling an agent in other kinds of domain creative is to praise that agent, or to imply that her ideas are particularly good. Consider a creative serial killer, who finds novel and ingenious ways of murdering his victims, or a creative torturer, who regularly devises new methods of torment. There is no contradiction in the idea that creativity can be put to terrible ends. Nor in such cases do we think that there is some value to the expression of creativity that is just massively outweighed by the harm in the product. “Creativity” is not a term of approbation in these contexts, nor do we imply that their ideas are objectively good after all, when we call such appalling people creative. Rather, the creative use of the imagination in producing harm makes matters worse.2 Creativity cannot be a disposition to produce objects that have objective value, because it can be exercised in domains where the ideas produced are objectively bad and lead to actions that are morally abhorrent. But perhaps a connection between creativity and objective value can be maintained if we restrict our attention to creativity in the arts and sciences, and similar domains in which creativity is naturally taken to be a positive quality, perhaps even a virtue, and where it is much more plausible that the ideas produced are objectively valuable. But even here, an artist or scientist may be creative, and produce ideas without objective value. Consider a scientist who creatively devises a theory (or even a series of theories) that turns out not to be true. Such a theory may have no scientific value whatsoever: it may not even be approximately true; it may lead to no scientific knowledge or understanding. Of course, we acknowledge that an idea may not be true (even approximately) but may nevertheless have an indirect value. Investigating a plausible (but false) hypothesis may help science to progress. Discovering why it is false may

98  Alison Hills and Alexander Bird help our understanding of the subject matter and may even point us in the direction of the truth. Mill’s (1859) defence of free speech makes a similar point—our understanding of the true may be deepened and made more resilient by critical engagement with the false. In order to gain knowledge by inference to the best explanation, it is important to consider the strengths of competing (false) hypotheses to know that the true hypothesis is true. Even so, not just any falsehood can help us better appreciate the truth. Some scientific ideas do not even have this indirect value. They are completely worthless. Below, we mention the work of Nikola Tesla which included worthless ideas for a thought camera and a death ray, and Herschel’s hypotheses about life on the moon. Creationist ideas, such as special creation, may be creative attempts to find a theory that reconciles creationist precepts with the evidence. But they are scientifically worthless. 2.1.2  Creativity without attributive value (“good of its kind”) Although novel methods of torture and murder are objectively bad, perhaps there is something to be said in their favour. A method of torture that is effective at inspiring fear and causing suffering may be excellent according to the standards of its kind, i.e. excellent qua method of torture. Maybe creativity is a disposition to produce objects that may not be objectively valuable but are nevertheless good with respect to their kind. This suggestion avoids the problems of tying creativity too closely to objective value. But it has a very significant difficulty of its own. Objects belong to multiple kinds: by which should they be judged? Presumably, we must say that creativity is the disposition to produce objects that are good qua some relevant kind (even if there are other kinds to which they belong, by whose standards they are not good). Typically (though not always) the most relevant kind will be that intended by the creator. But this will not do either. A torturer may devise a new method of torment—a variation on the rack, let us say—but find that it is a failure. Perhaps it causes death too quickly, without enough suffering on the way. As a method of torture, it is no good. But it does not follow that no creativity was exercised in coming up with the idea. As we have already seen, a scientist may creatively devise a novel hypothesis, investigate it, and find that it is a dead-end. As theories go, it was not a good one. Indeed if it is a mathematical conjecture it might in fact involve a contradiction. Consider Frege’s Grundgesetze (1893, 1903), which, whatever its other merits, must be regarded as a failure with respect to its most salient (and intended) kinds—a sound proof or attempt to derive the truths of mathematics from the laws of logic—because of its inconsistency. Russell nonetheless comments on Frege’s dedication to creative work (Russell 1962). Perhaps even an inconsistent theory which fails

Creativity without value  99 in its primary purpose can be good in some respect. For instance, it might inspire other, more successful attempts. At the very least, the discipline may progress by finding out that it is a failure. Frege’s Grundgesetze was valuable in these respects, most notably the inspiration that its inconsistency gave to Russell. But it is not relevant to whether Frege was creative, that his failure caused others, later, to be creative, or that it was good in these other respects. If Frege had never published his work, if he had had no influence on the discipline and had not inspired Russell and others, he would still have been creative in writing the Grundgesetze. Historians of mathematics recognize the creativity in Girolamo Saccheri’s (1733) several (failed) attempts to provide Euclid’s fifth (parallel) postulate, but, unlike Frege’s work, it was ignored and did not even have positive effects on subsequent mathematics. Similarly, in the arts, creative ideas may fail to have value by the standards of a relevant or intended kind. Arseny Avraamov was an avant-garde composer whose works included novel microtonal compositions, graphical sounds created by drawing on the sound track of a film, and the famous symphony of factory sirens. It is at best unclear whether these works are good of their kind: the evidence of posterity is that they were a dead end. But there is no doubting Avraamov’s creativity. 2.1.3  Creativity without value for the creator Perhaps we have been looking in the wrong place for the value of creativity. Perhaps it is not that the objects produced have some objective value or are good of their kind, but rather that they are good for the individual who creates them. Indeed some of the definitions of creativity regard the value in question as value for the creative individual. In what way might a creatively produced object be good for an individual? There seem to be two possibilities: either it contributes to the individual’s well-being, objectively conceived, or it satisfies her preferences and thus contributes to well-being, subjectively conceived. The latter is certainly not true of all instances of creativity. Many creative individuals are often intensely dissatisfied with their work ( Johannes Brahms burned many of his compositions; Gerard Manley Hopkins and many others have done likewise). Suppose instead we take an objective account of well-being. Is it more plausible that creatively produced objects contribute to a good life? Not necessarily. In many cases the object neither serves a need, nor brings a benefit. The act of creation may bring fulfilment to the individual. But that does not make the product, the work produced, valuable. The work may not give its creator pleasure, satisfy her preferences, meet the standards that she herself has set, and it may even fail to solve the problem that she posed for herself.

100  Alison Hills and Alexander Bird Moreover, depending on the details of the account of well-being, it may be that producing objects that are harmful or otherwise bad is not good for you. Is it really good to spend your time creating ever more elaborate methods of torture? However satisfying you find the work, and how effective the methods you devise, the answer is surely no. Perhaps the connection between creativity and well-being might be saved by the claim that creatively produced objects always constitute an achievement, and achievements are always good for you. But first, unless creatively produced objects are regarded as achievements simply in virtue of being creatively produced, it is far from clear that they do actually constitute achievements. Is a false scientific theory, a dead-end, an achievement? There is no obvious reason to think so. Secondly, even if we accept that creatively produced objects are often (or even always) achievements, it is not at all clear that all achievements are good for you. As we have already said, achievements in the field of torture are not good for you.3 It is possible to procrastinate creatively. It is not very plausible either that this constitutes an achievement or that it is good for you, in some respect or other.4 Thus, we have considered the three most obvious ways in which creativity might be the production of value, and have shown that none is essential to creativity. Nor do we think it plausible that creativity is the production of one or other of these. Creative individuals can be disposed to produce objects which fail to have value in any of these respects. 2.2  Recognizing creativity without assessing value If creativity was the disposition to produce objects of value, it would not be possible to recognize instances of creativity without assessing the value of the objects produced. If the object turned out to be valuable (and other conditions were met), its production might be the exercise of creativity; if it is not valuable (ceteris paribus), then its production might not be an exercise of creativity. But it is not necessary to evaluate the objects produced in order to assess the creativity involved in their production. For many forms of activity, there are creative ways of carrying them out in addition to mundane ways. We can recognize the creativity in George Stephenson’s 1850 Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits. To do so, we note first that he faced the problem of needing to create a bridge with large spans (to avoid interrupting shipping) that was strong enough to carry railway locomotives and freight. By imaginatively deciding to build the bridge from two wrought iron rectangular tubes, Stephenson was thereby able to give his bridge sufficient strength while increasing the longest wrought iron span to 140m from 10m thitherto. We do not need to

Creativity without value  101 know whether the bridge was beautiful or ugly or whether Anglesey benefitted from a rail connection to make that assessment; we do not even need to know whether bridges with longer wrought iron spans are better (in any respect) than bridges with short ones. Instead, we need to know how imaginative, novel, and fertile were his ideas, and how strong was his motivation to bring them to fruition. Above, we argued that we could judge Arseny Avraamov as creative without approving of or even assessing the value of what he did. All we need to see is that he was imaginative and original; he had many such ideas and was strongly motivated to carry them to completion. 2.3  The creative disposition Individuals who are creative often produce many ideas, of varying quality. Their creative dispositions sometimes lead them to devise objects that are valuable, at other times objects that are worthless. The inventor Nikola Tesla produced, alongside productive work on alternating current, a wide range of bizarre ideas for inventions, including a death ray, as well as theories of no merit concerning the nature of space-time and the electromagnetic field. William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus and of infrared radiation, had unsupported theories about the habitability of other planets (that the moon was rather like the English countryside, the surface of the sun was cool and inhabited). A defender of the standard account of creativity would have to say that Herschel had two sets of dispositions: one set (creativity) producing the ideas about Uranus and infrared radiation, and quite another set (definitely not creativity) producing the ideas about living on the sun and the moon as being similar to the Cotswolds. This is not psychologically realistic: it is the same psychological traits, notably a powerful imagination, which led Herschel to both sets of ideas. It is therefore not appropriate to give different explanations of how each set of ideas was produced—both are explained by the use of his imagination. A defender of the standard account might concede that there is really only one psychological disposition at work here, but claim that the term “creativity” is reserved for the use of that disposition when it results in valuable ideas. The use of that same psychological disposition to produce ideas of no value or of negative value is by definition not to be called “creative”. If so, we would expect a clear oxymoron when “creative” is used in connection with bad ideas. But it is not—as we have seen. “Creativity” can and commonly is used in circumstances where the ideas produced are valueless or even very bad. So it is neither useful nor correct to describe Herschel as creative only in devising ideas that turned out to be true, and uncreative when he postulated hypotheses that led nowhere.

102  Alison Hills and Alexander Bird

3 The original nonsense argument The argument most often cited as a reason for including value in the definition of creativity is that it serves to distinguish creativity from the disposition to produce “original nonsense.” Generating the latter would not, the argument goes, be an exercise of creativity, and so something in addition to originality is required. That something is value. Stokes (2016: 248), for example, asserts: most theorists maintain that creativity requires value. As Kant put it, “there can also be original nonsense” [1790/2000, 5: 308, 186], and nonsense is not creative. So, creativity requires, in addition to novelty, that an x be of some value to its maker and/or its context of making.

As it stands, this argument is weak. Even if the premise is correct, that there is no creativity in the original nonsense, it shows only that originality is not sufficient, not that value is necessary. It might be that the argument presented is a shorthand for a more detailed argument provided by Kant himself. But it seems to us that Kant was not offering the argument attributed to him. The “original nonsense” remark is in the context of discussion of beautiful art. Kant finds these artworks puzzling. How can they be created? Not by the mechanical application of a rule, he thinks, for no such rule could produce works of genuine value. Any that are produced by the application of a supposed rule are, he says, of very poor quality.5 Rather “Beautiful art is art of genius.”6 Genius is “the inborn predisposition of the mind through which nature gives the rule to art.” Genius is contrasted with, on the one hand, following a determinate rule and, on the other hand, with mere imitation of other works of art. Instead, it consists primarily in the imagination. What Kant calls genius, therefore, is very close to what we call creativity. And Kant seems to say perfectly clearly that genius (creativity) necessarily involves value: Genius (1) is a talent for producing that for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition of skill for that which can be learned in accordance with some rule, consequently that originality must be its primary characteristic. (2) that since there can also be original nonsense, its products must at the same time be models, i.e. exemplary, hence, which not themselves the result of imitation, they must yet serve others in that way, i.e. as a standard or rule for judging. Kant 1790/2000, 5:307–8, p. 186–7

This passage appears to do exactly what the proponents of the “original nonsense” argument say it does. That is, it expresses an argument that

Creativity without value  103 genius consists in originality, and in addition requires that the products of genius not be original nonsense, but be valuable (“set the standard or rule of judging”). So it seems perfectly in order to cite Kant in support of the traditional account of creativity, where creativity (genius) is defined as the combination of the two familiar components: originality and value. However, matters are not so simple. A few pages later, Kant appears to contradict himself. He says that creative genius by itself may not produce works of value. Instead, it needs to be constrained or tempered by aesthetic judgement or “taste”: Taste, like the power of judgment in general, is the discipline (or corrective) of genius, clipping its wings and making it well behaved or polished; but at the same time it gives genius guidance as to where and how far it should extend itself if it is to remain purposive; and by introducing clarity and order into the abundance of thoughts it makes the ideas tenable, capable of an enduring and universal approval, of enjoying a posterity among others and in an ever progressing culture. Thus if anything must be sacrificed in the conflict of the two properties in one product, it must rather be on the side of genius. 1790/2000, 5: 320, 197

In this quote, Kant appears to say that in order to produce ideas that are “capable of enduring and universal approval”—that is, valuable ideas— creativity (genius) must be constrained or guided by an entirely separate quality, a kind of judgement. As he also says, the imaginative power of genius produces art that is inspired, but it is in virtue of the power of judgement that the art is beautiful. Genius can produce art that is rich and original in ideas but it is taste, not genius, that brings the imagination in line with understanding and thus ensures that the ideas are good ones. In other words, the view that Kant expresses here is remarkably similar to our own; he defines creativity in terms of producing original ideas through the power of imagination, and he denies that creativity (in the absence of good taste, or good aesthetic judgement) is a disposition to produce value. So what is the best interpretation of Kant’s view of genius: does he think that genius cannot produce “original nonsense”, but will always produce ideas that are valuable as well as original? Or does he actually argue against that view? How is it best to understand these two apparently contradictory passages? Let us start with the second passage, on taste. One way of reconciling it with the first, is to reinterpret it very significantly. Perhaps Kant does not really mean that genius and taste together produce beautiful art. Just before this passage, he introduced the idea of “spirit.” Spirit is the “animating principle of the mind”; it is also very closely identified with the power of the imagination.7 It is the quality of mind that enables an

104  Alison Hills and Alexander Bird artist to produce artworks that have “life” or “energy”: that which is lacking when one describes a poem as pretty but without spirit, or a story as well organized but without spirit. Perhaps what Kant means to say in this passage is that spirit and taste together produce beautiful art. Now, if we regard genius (creativity) as spirit and taste—that is, imagination and judgement combined—then genius will produce original and valuable art, never original nonsense.8 This reading of the passage supports the idea that creativity (genius) necessarily produces value. But it does so at the cost of ignoring the awkward fact that Kant quite explicitly talks about genius (not spirit) being constrained by taste here, not only in the passage quoted, but in the very title of section 50: “On the combination of taste with genius in products of beautiful art.” This interpretation therefore makes his views consistent, only by having him make a very significant confusion in formulating his own theory. Moreover, the two passages can be reconciled in a way that is more charitable to Kant. Let us look again at the earlier passage. It appears in a context in which Kant is trying to explain how beautiful art is created: remember that he does not think it can be produced by following a rule or imitating other example of good art. Kant argues that genius is necessary for beautiful art (“beautiful art is possible only as a product of genius” 1790/2000, 5: 307, 186). When he continues: “its products must at the same time be models, i.e. exemplary” he is standardly interpreted as saying that the products of genius are (always) valuable, that is, that genius is not merely necessary but is sufficient for beautiful art. But that may not be what is meant. Instead, he may be saying precisely the opposite, namely that genius can produce originality of all kinds, including original nonsense, and beautiful art is possible only when the products of genius are exemplary. The second passage, a few pages later, explains when the products of genius are exemplary: precisely when genius is constrained and guided by good judgement, namely, by taste. As a reading of Kant, this has the advantage of making his views consistent without making a very blatant error (of confusing “genius” and “spirit”); instead, it has him merely moving from a discussion of how genius can produce beautiful art to the conditions under which it will do so (which he will describe in detail later), without marking the distinction clearly. It is a more charitable reading of Kant, and, of course, supports our own account of creativity, that creativity can produce original, imaginative ideas that lack value. Even if Kant does not make the case, perhaps there is still a good argument that original nonsense is not creative, and thus that creativity must involve value. Without more detail, it is difficult to assess such an argument. Nonetheless, under any reasonable interpretation, it is unsound.

Creativity without value  105 Either the original nonsense has content or it does not. First, assume that it does not. That makes the premise, that the original nonsense is not creative, more plausible. But then the argument is clearly invalid. The missing element that creativity requires in addition to originality might be anything that is not itself entailed by originality but which is inconsistent with being nonsense. Value is one candidate, but there are others—notably, imagination. If the original nonsense has no content, then it cannot be the product of the imagination, which is essentially representational.9 Therefore, the imagination is a plausible candidate for what distinguishes original nonsense from a creative product. No content means no use of the imagination, which means no creativity. On the other hand, if there is some content to the “nonsense”, then it is not so clear that there is no creativity at all. We use many terms denoting traits to describe people when they have a trait to a notably greater degree than normal; even though we acknowledge that many (perhaps all) have the trait to some degree. We typically use the term “creative” to pick out those individuals who are creative to a degree somewhat greater than normal, while being willing to acknowledge that the majority of people can show creativity to a modest degree if given the opportunity. So it might be that a concrete instance of alleged original nonsense would be recognized as an instance of creativity, albeit of the most minimal kind. (What linguists call “creativity” is the ability to produce novel sentences. This use is not inappropriate. It just focuses on one form of creativity some of whose instances are quite insignificant with regard to creativity in the wider sense, but not entirely empty.) With this thought in mind, we might distinguish between “minimal creativity” and “substantial creativity.”10 Original nonsense with some content may be a mark of minimal creativity but not of substantial creativity. According to our view, minimal and substantial creativity would not be distinguished by the value of what is created, however, but by the number, originality and imaginativeness of the ideas produced.

4 Conclusion Modern liberal societies set great store by creativity; the value placed on it is unquestioned. It is hardly surprising then that almost all theorists regard value as essential to creativity. Yet, the only argument typically cited in favour of that standard view, the “original nonsense” argument, is unsound (and is not even to be found in Kant to whom it is attributed). Against the standard view, we have argued that creativity can easily, in the wrong circumstances, be put to producing objects of no value and of disvalue (on any reasonable construal of “value”). It is the same disposition in either case. Rather than value, we propose that the imagination is essential to creativity: creativity is the disposition to use the imagination in the fertile

106  Alison Hills and Alexander Bird production of ideas along with the motivation to bring those ideas to fruition. Such a disposition will not necessarily produce valuable ideas and objects (not even ceteris paribus). This conception of creativity raises many questions. What is the imagination and is it really involved in every example of creativity? What about instances of creativity in which an individual is apparently struck by an idea without having any conscious thoughts about it beforehand? Is the imagination still involved? Is creativity, thus conceived, still likely to produce value? Is more creativity better than less? We intend to say more about these important issues elsewhere. Here, we will just say that we take a liberal view on the imagination and the forms that it can take. And our view is that more creativity is not always better than less. In fact, creativity tends to produce works of value only when two additional conditions are in place: a tradition of models and exemplars that are themselves valuable, to stimulate and guide the imagination in its search for new items of value; and good judgment to discern which of the new ideas produced by the imagination do indeed have value. Without these conditions in place, creativity without value is not only possible, but likely.

Acknowledgments We are grateful to Anthony Everett, Berys Gaut, Matthew Kieran, and Mike Stuart for their very helpful comments on a draft of this paper.

Notes 1 Grant (2012) also argues that creativity (which he calls “imaginativeness”) does not necessarily produce objects of value, though he does require (as we do not) that it should be reasonable for the creator to think that her ideas would be valuable, or achieve something. 2 Cropley and Cropley (2013) analyze in detail the contribution of creativity to crime. 3 Many, but not all, objective theories of well-being involve some moral content, such that actions that are morally wrong (or in other ways falling short of moral virtue) are to that degree not in your interests. But the point holds as long as there are aspects of well-being other than achievement, even if they are not moral. For in that case even something that is an achievement but is very bad with regard to other aspects of well-being, may not overall be in your interests, and so producing it may not be good for you. 4 Grant (2012) also argues that creativity (imaginativeness) is not always good for its possessor, but that it can be, through its connection to autonomy and (sometimes) to self-realization. 5 Kant 1790/2000, 5: 307–8, 186–7. 6 Kant 1790/2000 5:307, 186. 7 Kant 1790/2000, 5: 313, 191–2. 8 There is some textual support elsewhere for this kind of account of genius: “The mental powers, whose union (in a certain relation) constitutes genius, are imagination and understanding” (Kant 5:316, 194). But what Kant seems to mean is that the relationship between imagination and cognition required for genius is very different from the relationship in which the two stand in ordinary cognition. It may still be true that to produce value, genius, even understood in this way, must be combined with additional judgement in the form of taste—and Kant of course argues that it does in the very next section.

Creativity without value  107 9 Kind 2016: 3. That imaginings are representational, and so have intentional content, is widely accepted among theorists of the imagination and is entailed by our view of the imagination as searching the space of possibilities. 10 Or ‘little-c-creativity’ and ‘Big-C-Creativity’ to use expressions in common use among psychologists. Minimal or little-c-creativity is creativity to the degree that pretty well every human beyond infancy possesses, whereas substantial or Big-C-Creativity is the greater and relatively unusual degree of creativity possessed by individuals we characteristically call ‘creative’. Psychologists are not all in agreement as to where to draw the line between little-c-creativity and Big-C-Creativity, which is why we have avoided the terms. Sometimes it appears that the distinction is close to the minimal/substantial distinction, while for others Big-C-Creativity is the creativity only of geniuses.

References Barron, F. (1955) “The disposition towards originality,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51, 478–85. Boden, M. (2010) Creativity and Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cropley, D. H. and A. J. Cropley (2013) Creativity and Crime: A Psychological Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frege, G. (1893, 1903) Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Bände I, II. Jena: Verlag Herman Pohle. Gaut, B. and P. Livingston. (2003) “The creation of art. Issues and perspectives,” in B. Gaut and P. Livingston (eds) The Creation of Art. New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–32. Grant, James. (2012) “The value of imaginativeness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 90, 275–89. Kant, I. (1790/2000) Critique of the Power of Judgment. (Ed. P. Guyer, trans P. Guyer and E. Matthews.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kieran, M. (2014) “Creativity as a virtue of character,” in E. Paul and S. Kauffman (eds), The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 125–44; DOI:10.1093/acprof: oso/9780199836963.001.0001. Kind, A. (2016) “Introduction. Exploring imagination,” in A. Kind (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination. London: Routledge, 10–11. Mill, J. S. (1859) On Liberty. London: J. W. Parker. Runco, M. A. and G. J. Jaeger. (2012) “The standard definition of creativity,” Creativity Research Journal, 24, 92–6. Russell, B. (1962) “Letter to Professor van Heijenoort,” in J. van Heijenoort (ed.) From Frege to Gödel. A Sourcebook in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 127. Saccheri, G. G. (1733) Euclides ab omni nævo vindicatus. Milan. Sternberg, R J. and T. I. Lubart. (1999) “The concept of creativity: Prospects and paradigms,” in R. J. Sternberg (ed.) Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stokes, D. (2016) “Imagination and creativity,” in A. Kind (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination. London: Routledge, 247–61.

7

Explicating ‘creativity’ Paisley Livingston

Given the many ways people use the word, it seems unlikely that ‘­creativity’ names a single concept shared by all reasonably well-informed parties. An explication of ‘creativity’ can, however, identify “a good thing to mean” by this term in the context of systematic enquiry.1 Contributing to such an explication is the aim of this chapter. My focus is on creative actions and achievements. What makes such things creative, I propose, is originality in the devising of an effective means to some end. This proposal stands in contrast to value-neutral conceptions of creativity, as well as to various honorific conceptions according to which the pursuit or realisation of good goals is necessary to creativity. My point of departure is the oft-repeated claim that creativity is a species of valuable novelty (e.g. Boden 2010: 1; Csikszentmihalyi 1996: 27). As the sense of this claim depends on how its constituent concepts are disambiguated, in the first section I examine different notions associated with the expressions ‘novelty’, ‘originality’, ‘priority’, ‘unprecedented’, and ‘innovative’. In the second section, I turn to the axiological conditions. I discuss some arguments supporting strong conditions as well as counterexamples that challenge their alleged necessity. I consider a value-neutral idea of creativity and propose an instrumental success condition. In the final section, I examine some claims about relations between novelty and value as constituents of creativity.

1  Kinds of novelty Although it is often stated that novelty is a necessary attribute of all creative items, it is not easy to say just what this entails (Hausman 2009: 5). Is novelty only a subjective projection of someone’s surprise or unfamiliarity, a pseudo-property that may be dispelled by a second look? An alternative to this sort of subjectivism about novelty is to identify it as a real attribute of particular, spatio-temporally located events. Yet, such a notion would appear to be vacuous because every particular event or action is novel in that it has never happened before. Perhaps it would be better to say that an event is novel only if it is the first instance of a kind. Second

Explicating ‘creativity’  109 and subsequent instances of the kind are not novel, at least relative to that kind. There are reasons, however, why this very broad sortal–relative conception of novelty is not an adequate constituent of our explication of ‘creativity’. Consider, for example, the (1970) work of fiction by Erich Segal entitled Love Story, which may come to mind when one searches for examples of hackneyed but lucrative popular fiction. With regard to any number of kinds one might think of, this work was unquestionably first of the kind. For example, it was the first best-seller romance published by a classics professor at Yale University. Given a broad, kind-relative elucidation of what ‘novel’ means, this was a novel feature of the work, but it hardly counts for or against its creativity. What needs identifying is the kind or kinds that pick out the sort of novelty that is directly relevant to creativity. Reference to some uncontroversial examples of creative and uncreative achievements can help us with this problem. Consider first the accomplishments of the Russian high jumper Valeriy Brumel, who used the familiar straddle technique to set the first of his six world records at the high jump in 1961, being the first to clear the bar at 2.23 metres (Matthews 2012: 42–43). This was a skilled and exceptional performance, but was it creative? It seems perfectly obvious that it was not. If you doubt this, try to say which features of his performance were ‘creative’ or manifested creativity. Consider now another athlete, Richard Fosbury, who abandoned the straddle technique in the early 1960s and came up with a new way of jumping by turning his back to the bar just before taking off. Using this effective new technique that he had independently devised, Fosbury won an Olympic gold medal and set an Olympic (but not world) record in 1968 (Matthews 2012: 82). Fosbury’s achievement is widely acclaimed as creative (e.g. Kaufmann and Runco 2009: 156). What is far less well known is that a Canadian athlete, Debbie Brill, independently developed a similar technique some two years after he had done so (Oliver 2014: 39–40). Brill became the Canadian national high jump champion, but never achieved the fame enjoyed by Fosbury, who was her elder by six years, and who was first to use the back-to-the-bar technique in major international competitions. In their contributions to the sport, all three jumpers shared the end of maximising the height at which the bar was crossed in keeping with the rules of the event. The key difference between the achievements of Fosbury and Brill, on the one hand, and Brumel’s, on the other, is that even though Brumel successfully cleared the bar at unprecedented levels, he did not innovate with regard to technique. In contrast, Fosbury was the first to come up with an unprecedented means to the end of excelling in high-jump competitions: the “Fosbury flop.” Brill too was no mere copy-cat: she independently developed her own backward jump (‘the Brill bend’) well before Fosbury’s innovation became famous by virtue of his

110  Paisley Livingston televised use of the technique at the 1968 Olympics. These cases suggest that at least one important kind of novelty we are looking for with regard to creativity is novelty in devising a means to some end. Given the goal of their chosen sporting event, Fosbury and Brill were both innovative in precisely this sense, while Brumel was not. Is this result generalizable to uncontroversial examples of creative achievements in other domains? It is easy to find examples in the arts that fit the pattern. Consider the case of Un chien andalou, a short film coauthored by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí in 1929. The filmmakers’ most immediate goals in making this film were to shock or épater a bourgeois audience and to exemplify surrealist attitudes using the cinematic medium (Admowicz 2010: 9). These were not new goals, but given those ends, the making of this film was both an effective and an innovative achievement. Various cinematic devices are used to baffle and annoy any viewer who expects the film to present some kind of commonsensical or familiar sequence of story events. Most famously, early in the film there is a disturbing montage sequence in which a man appears to slice a woman’s eye with a razor. A very remote literary antecedent could perhaps be identified in Shakepeare’s line, “Out vile jelly? Where is thy lustre now?” (The Tragedy of King Lear 1917: III, vii, 82), but no such surprising and shocking montage had been included in a film before.2 It is possible to identify many other examples of creative achievements involving the devising of new means for the realisation of ends. To mention a few cases that often come up in the literature on creativity, Goodyear found a new means of preparing rubber in the making of tyres; Jenner found a new technique for preventing disease using vaccinations; Galileo found ways to test, refute, and improve on Aristotle’s claims about motion; and so on. Coming up with unprecedented means to some goal looks to be crucial to the novelty of creative achievements. With this in mind, the relevant explication of ‘novel’ can be stated as follows: (N1) a particular action, α1, performed by A at t1 using means, M, is novel1 just in case it is the first instance in which M was used to perform an action of kind α.

Berys Gaut (personal communication) raised the objection that it is also possible to be creative in the generation of ends, in which case the sort of novelty identified above would not be necessary to creativity. For example, someone could independently recognise or make friendship, beauty, freedom, or the good life a final value; that person could even have been the very first human being in all history to have done so. If that is so, the ‘just in case’ in (N1) is too ambitious and should be replaced by an ‘if ’.

Explicating ‘creativity’  111 I wonder, however, whether these sorts of cases should be identified as creative achievements if the relevant agents devised no new means to the realisation of actual instances of the final value in question. Simply valuing x intrinsically, or acquiring the attitude that some x is a final end, is neither necessary nor sufficient to realising a creative achievement, whereas coming up with innovative means to such ends, possibly along with the original discovery or invention of those ends, would be both. There is at least one other potential problem with (N1): only one of the relevant senses of ‘novel’ is identified. I have in mind a distinction that Robert K. Merton (1957) couched in terms of ‘originality’ and ‘priority’. Following Merton’s stipulation, someone who is the very first to make a discovery or invention has priority, and this is the sense of ‘novel’ identified by (N1). ‘Originality’, Merton stipulates, refers to a discovery that is realised independently, but that may or may not have priority. Here is how ‘novelty’ in the sense of Merton’s ‘originality’ might be elucidated: (N2) a particular action, α1, performed by A at t1 using means, M, is novel2 just in case it is the first instance in which A used M to perform an action of kind α, where A’s intentional use of M to perform α1 does not depend on any knowledge on the part of A of someone else’s prior use of M to perform actions of type α.

Given (N1) and (N2), we can say that Fosbury is credited with priority; Brill manifested originality, but did not have priority; and Brumel had neither—with regard to technique, that is. What if Brill had heard about Fosbury’s flop, but then forgot all about it and later rediscovered the ‘new’ technique? If this rediscovery was causally dependent on Brill’s earlier knowledge of Fosbury’s action (by virtue, say, of some unconscious psychological process), then this would not be a case of originality. Does (N1) or (N2) give us the primary or even the only relevant sense in which a creative achievement is novel? In her influential contributions to the literature on creativity, Margaret A. Boden weighs in on the side of originality—or what she calls ‘psychological creativity’, as opposed to historical creativity (Merton’s ‘priority’). She claims that the latter allows of no “systematic explanation” (1990: 34). Psychological creativity, she observes (2009: 238), does not entail historical creativity, whereas every case of historical creativity involves some kind of psychological process. “The first step to understanding H-creativity is to understand P-creativity,” Boden adds in the same context, going on to say that the study of psychological creativity should be granted methodological priority because it concerns the “core processes” that are involved in creativity. With regard to the psychological springs of originality, Boden consistently refers to changes to what she calls a “conceptual space” or “landscape with a characteristic

112  Paisley Livingston structure and potential,” as well as to the “generative principles” and “rules” constitutive of a mental space or domain. She argues that the really striking instances of creativity involve changes in these rules or constraints. Boden could be right about the relevance of originality to creativity even if (as is argued in Novitz 1999) her claims about the core processes at work in creativity turn out to be mistaken or lacking in explanatory depth. In other words, it would be a mistake to deny the salient, creative difference between Brill’s and Brumel’s athletic achievements on the grounds that Brill did not have priority, and one sees no other grounds on which such a denial might be based. The excellent reasons we have for attributing creativity to Fosbury for his invention of the flop carry over without loss to Brill’s independent invention of her bend. The differences between their two achievements with regard to priority versus originality have to do with the historical context in which an individual does something and with that person’s knowledge or ignorance of relevant antecedent achievements. Since there is no priority without originality, the live question is whether the novelty component of creativity could be exclusively a matter of originality, in the sense of (N2). In the rest of this section I survey and assess considerations relevant to this question. While it would be most convenient to set priority aside and understand creativity entirely in terms of originality, this overlooks some aspects of the value that people often look for in creative achievements. Priority, and not just originality, remains a kind of novelty or innovation that people are often interested in identifying. With regard to actions and ideas in various pursuits or fields of endeavour, people want to know when and how the first instances took place, and they want to know this in general, and not just relative to a particular person or some restricted domain of activity. Merton and his colleagues investigated the great emphasis placed in scientific institutions on priority of discovery, as evidenced by the many controversies over priority—a well-known example being the bitter dispute between Newton, Leibniz, and their followers over the invention of the calculus. The solution was clearly not a matter of saying that the really important sort of creativity resided in how the advent of these mathematical ideas stood in relation to the individual thinkers’ own prior activities or psychological states. The dispute would not have been settled had it been established that Leibniz had manifested greater personal originality than had Newton, or vice versa, nor would it have helped if it had been discovered that both thinkers had exhibited equal measures of originality. What the parties in the Prioritätstreit wanted to know was which thinker came up with the valuable ideas first and why would that sort of achievement be deemed superior to one that manifest only originality. Merton conjectures that the key function of the institutionalised emphasis on priority is to motivate scientists to make and publish new

Explicating ‘creativity’  113 discoveries and thereby contribute to the independently valued growth of scientific knowledge. In such a context, priority of publication could even trump priority of discovery since it is the former that best serves scientific knowledge as a social institution. Perhaps an analogous argument could be given to explain the emphasis on priority in other domains, but there could be other and more fundamental reasons as well, such as a spontaneous admiration for realising the (increasingly) difficult feat of coming up with something nobody else has managed to do before. Epistemic problems besetting claims about priority may be taken as grounds for an exclusive focus on originality. In response to this thought, it must be acknowledged that sometimes the “who was first?” question finds no solid answer, so we are left with a choice between agnosticism and risky conjectures when it comes to priority. So why not give up on that notion entirely and focus entirely on originality? One reason why that might not be the best policy is that in some cases the evidence about priority stacks up very well. In the case of Fosbury and Brill, we have their testimony and the public record of their respective athletic performances and training. In interviews, Fosbury acknowledged Brill’s independent invention of her bend; Brill did not contest Fosbury’s priority (Brill and Lawton 1986).3 There is no good reason to doubt that Fosbury had priority, even if we cannot undertake a perfectly exhaustive and infallible search proving that no one else ever tried jumping with his or her back to the bar prior to Fosbury’s famous performance. Also, is knowledge of originality, as opposed to priority, any more certain? When we attribute originality to someone, can we be absolutely certain that this person has not knowingly or unwittingly copied someone else’s achievement? In some cases, establishing that there was no copying or unconscious influence could be just as difficult as establishing a claim about world-historical priority. So, epistemic worries and desiderata are hardly decisive when it comes to the question of what sorts of novelty are relevant to creativity. There is also a question about the scope of priority. Is it appropriate or even viable to think in terms of priority relative to all human history as opposed, say, to more limited domains, such as a given socio-cultural sphere or tradition? For example, do not many people discussing the creativity of some item restrict their remarks to Asian or Western spheres, thereby dropping unmanageable questions of absolute historical priority?4 One response to this question is that this is a practically useful tactic but not one that reflects a defensible substantive position regarding novelty. It is perhaps telling that if sufficient evidence arises indicating that the boundary between traditions or cultures was in fact crossed, and that an apparent innovation in one tradition was actually borrowed from or influenced by an earlier innovation in a different tradition, assessments of the former innovation are revised accordingly. An example would be

114  Paisley Livingston art historians’ tracking down Asian and African sources for seemingly ­innovative features of modernist Western art. To sum this part up, priority is often valued over originality. A single-minded focus on originality has the shortcoming of overlooking this well-entrenched interest in priority. On the other hand, it would be wrong to deem priority strictly necessary to the kind of novelty required of all creative achievements. Priority is, however, sufficient to it, as is originality. Though there is no priority without originality, there can be originality without priority—as the Brill bend case was taken as establishing. One aspect of Brill’s situation is that it would have been very difficult for her to have known about Fosbury’s prior experimentation with the flop. In this regard, she may be contrasted to someone who manages a feat of originality while remaining irresponsibly ignorant of prior accomplishments. Such a person’s achievement is likely to be deemed less creative than that of someone who was reasonably aware of relevant antecedents and nonetheless manages to devise an effective new technique. Does novelty in the sense of originality, or (N2) above, suffice to pick out the actions and products to be classified as creative? Not according to the proponents of honorific explications of creativity, who hold that some behaviour or its product is creative only if it satisfies a strong axiological condition, which most often amounts to requiring that anything creative must be good for its own sake, or at least good as a means to some genuinely valuable end. In other words, even if an action or invention is novel in the sense of exhibiting psychological originality, it could still fail to be creative if it does not manifest the right sort of value. Such strong claims about the relations between creativity and value are examined in the next section.

2  Creativity and value Are robust value conditions on creativity conceptual truths? Do they identify essential features of all genuinely creative actions and their products? Or are they desiderata regarding what merits recognition as instances of good or exemplary creativity? I argue for the latter option in this section: it is doubtful that strong normative conditions are met in all of the events or achievements that it is a good idea to classify as creative. As Berys Gaut (forthcoming) puts it, “not all exercises of creativity are valuable, since not all the kinds produced are valuable.” More bluntly, it is not contradictory to speak of ‘bad creativity’. A weaker axiological condition, may, however, be warranted, and below I explore ways in which it might be formulated and defended. In arguing that there can be bad creativity, I claim neither priority nor originality. In a paper first published in 1954, C. R. Rogers reported

Explicating ‘creativity’  115 on a similar intuition: “One man may be discovering a way of relieving pain, whereas another is devising a new and more subtle form of torture for political prisoners. Both these actions seem to me creative” (1970: 139). In the same vein, Robert B. McClaren (1993) recognises the existence of harmful creativity, and more recently, David H. Cropley, James C. Kaufman, and Arthur J. Cropley (2008) allow that criminal and terrorist actions, such as the 9/11 attacks, can be ‘highly creative’. To embroider on Rogers’ example, imagine an evil but creative torturer who acts on entirely sadistic motives. This vile fiend creates a device that has a new way of inflicting unprecedented amounts of pain on the victims. The invention is creative but evil. If it is objected that the device must have some good uses or valuable side effects, it would be fair to ask why that must be so. How (and when) was it established that if some α is an effective means to some valueless or evil end E, necessarily, α serves as an effective means to some valuable or good end, E’? Some readers may protest that the torture-device counterexample is a philosophical conceit. For those who prefer actual examples, the annals of crime include many cases of creative wrongdoings incompatible with a strong axiological condition involving the actual promotion of a final good (Cropley and Cropley 2013).5 Many of the creative felonies reported by law enforcement agencies were not only immoral, but proved in the long run to be self-defeating for the perpetrators, and so fail even to satisfy weak conditions on prudential value or rationality with a small ‘r’. Advocates of honorific Creativity with a capital ‘c’ may deny on intuitive grounds that such examples are really creative. Yet, what arguments can be given in support of such rulings? There are precious few in the literature. One salient attempt is David Novitz’s bold (2003) effort to derive an honorific notion of creativity from conceptual truths. He contends that behaviour that is “destructive” cannot be creative, because creation and destruction are antithetical: “It is a conceptual truth that creative and destructive acts exclude and need to be distinguished from each other in any theory of creativity” (2003: 186). This is not a successful argument, as James Grant (2012) has contended. It may well be conceptually true that one cannot create and destroy something in the same sense at the same time, but it is not contradictory to say that some action or invention could be creative as well as sadistic. Novitz equivocates when he asserts that “acts that are deliberately harmful or malicious are properly thought of as destructive” (2003: 185). In the example as I conceive of it, the sadist creates and uses a novel instrument of torture that can be used to inflict great pain, and there is no good end served by this invention. Yet the victim is not literally destroyed in any “proper” sense, so the example does not fall under Novitz’s ban on saying oxymoronically that some act is “creatively destructive.” As Matthew Kieran notes in this regard, whether something

116  Paisley Livingston is immoral is distinct from whether it is destructive: it is good to destroy some bad things.6 In an earlier paper, Novitz proposed an explication of ‘creative’ based on a weaker condition to the effect that creative acts must be “intended to be, and are potentially, of real value to some people” (1999: 77). This clause as well does not look to express a defensible conceptual truth. Just what would count as a telling counterexample to such a condition depends on how the expressions ‘real value’ and ‘potentially’ are understood. If it is allowed that the innovative torture device potentially has real value to the sadistic torturer who plans on using it, then the condition has become extremely weak—too weak to support genuinely honorific intuitions about creativity. If, however, this is not admitted, and the innovative torture device is recognised as creative, we have a counterexample to the honorific conception. A better argument is wanted if it is to be established that Creativity covers all relevant cases. Another strategy that could be taken up in this regard would be to appeal to an Aristotle-inspired doctrine of the unity of the virtues.7 The basic idea is that evil actions cannot be creative any more than novel criminal scheming can be an instance of phronesis, practical wisdom, or any other virtue. But in a context where doubt about a strong axiological condition is on the table, this argument for a moral condition on creativity is unacceptably question-begging because it relies upon the contested assumption that creativity is directly dependent on a system of inter-related moral or intellectual virtues. No virtue, no creativity, reads the contested premise. Someone who doubts this premise can hold that creativity is not a virtue at all, but a feature of behaviour independent of a holistic system of positive moral personality dispositions or traits. It may be worth recalling that Aristotle, who is an important source for the thesis of the unity of the virtues, explicitly allows in his Nicomachean Ethics (2000: 1144a) that both practically wise and villainous people can be clever [deinos]. Why can creativity not have the same status as cleverness in Aristotle’s scheme, in which case it too could be manifest in either virtuous or immoral actions? We lack a reason why creative acts cannot be similar to clever ones in this respect and not necessarily be the product of practical wisdom working in harmony with the other virtues. Another way to argue for an axiological condition on creativity runs as follows. The first premise is that the term ‘creative’ names a property manifested only by purposeful behaviour and its artifacts; on this view, no matter how novel and worthwhile they may be, non-purposeful natural events and objects cannot be creative. Since they belong to the larger category of purposive doings, creative acts and products all have an intentional source relative to which they are valued or prized in at least a subjective sense. So for all agents, S, and actions, α, S’s doing α cannot be creative unless

Explicating ‘creativity’  117 S values doing α. It follows validly that all creative actions are valuable at least from the perspective of the agent. There are, however, plausible objections to this line of thought. Suppose our creative sadist is a wanton individual who does not value his own sadistic inclinations and corresponding actions. Driven by impulses he cannot control, the sadist nonetheless finds clever, novel ways to satisfy his cravings. The result is a series of creative acts that do not satisfy even the weakened axiological condition just mentioned. To deal with such a case, we could revise the condition and change S’s necessary attitude from values to wants, desires, or preferences, but then we end up with something too weak to serve as an honorific concept of Creativity, if only because the wants and desires in question could be immoral or self-defeating, even from the perspective of the agent. The crux of the problem is that there is intentional, skillful, innovative behaviour that is not a matter of even trying to do good or valuable things, or even what one deems, all things considered, to be good or valuable things. Are we warranted to conclude that there is no justifiable axiological condition on creativity? What about instrumental value, understood as the devising of effective means to ends that may themselves actually be good, bad, or indifferent? As was suggested above, many uncontroversial examples of creativity manifest this sort of efficacy or instrumental value, and that includes cases that do not satisfy stronger axiological conditions. An instrumental success condition is entailed by the formulations of (N1) and (N2) above, it being implicit that the innovative means must be employed in the successful performance of the action. In the complete absence of a successful performance, an attribution of creativity does not seem justifiable. For the sake of clarity, we can recapitulate the ‘minimal creative action condition’ as follows: (MC) a particular action, α1, successfully performed by A at t1 using means, M, is creative just in case it is the first instance in which A used M to perform an action of kind α, where A’s intentional use of M to perform α1 does not depend on any knowledge on the part of A of someone else’s prior use of M to perform actions of type α.8

How might one argue in favour of such an explication of creative achievements? Uncontroversial cases of creative exploits fit the pattern. Pick any invention that is generally hailed as creative and ask whether it does not exhibit some measure of success in realising the relevant goals. One might think that a good place to look for counterexamples would be the category of creative failures. Think, for example, of some of the inventive but disastrous attempts that were made in the early history of aviation (Hallion 2003, Abzug and Larrabee, 2002). Such failures are only worth

118  Paisley Livingston calling ‘creative’ because some part of the inventor’s complex innovative action proved effective. For example, the design for a heavier-than-air flying machine actually generated sufficient lift to get the machine off the ground, which was a significant advance relative to the many previous devices that had failed in this regard. This part was successful, but the lack of an adequate steering mechanism led to a crash. Whence the justification for calling this invention a creative failure. The overall action did not satisfy (MC), but the attempt to generate sufficient lift did. Or imagine that someone is the first to come up with an elaborate but hopeless opening in chess (e.g. some system for advancing the rook and bishop pawns). This innovative set of moves does not serve the object of the game, which is to checkmate the opponent, since anyone who uses it is most likely to lose against any moderately skillful player. If one agrees that it would not be appropriate to call such an ineffective innovation ‘creative’, the salient reason is that it has no instrumental value relative to the inventor’s goal of devising an effective opening in chess. It is not enough that an inventor anticipates or believes that his or her invention is an effective means to a chosen end (even if that end is a very good end, or even a new final value); if it is to be counted as creative, the innovation has to be somewhat effective in contributing to the realisation of the end. This instrumental value condition is compatible, by the way, with Gaut’s (2009, 2014) instructive emphasis on the link between creativity and skill, as well as with the possibility of an inventor’s inclusion of stochastic elements in the creative process. It is also compatible with the akratic torturer example mentioned above: that horrible device works, even if the ends are pernicious and not recommended by the inventor’s (or anyone else’s) best overall judgement. Is (MC)—the instrumental condition coupled with the originality condition—too weak to provide a viable explication of creative achievements? Suppose someone settles on a pointless or silly goal—finding a way to lose at chess—a goal, moreover, that it is fairly easy to realise, as long as one’s opponent is trying to win. Suppose as well that this person, who is a novice at chess, unwittingly recapitulates a somewhat effective way of realising this goal (i.e. get your king out early), thereby manifesting some small measure of originality. Do we allow that this is an instance of creativity? Well, why not? Creativity is a matter of degree, and this case can be recognised as fitting on the lower end of the spectrum as a mildly creative feat that not everyone could accomplish. Consider now the axiological condition on ‘imaginativeness’ or creativity proposed by Grant, which requires (1) that it was plausible for the person to believe that the item had a reasonable chance of contributing significantly to its value, (2) that coming up with this item was not derivative, and (3) that thinking of this item was not obvious (Grant 2012, 281).

Explicating ‘creativity’  119 I am not sure whether all of these conditions are met by my ‘get the king out early’ example as described above. The player’s minor innovation satisfies the non-imitative condition, or (2), but it may fall short of (3), the non-obviousness requirement. Someone might think, however, that getting the king out early is a pretty obvious way to lose at chess. But we could well imagine a case where it was not really obvious to the novice chess player, who had to think a while and experiment a bit before coming up with it. What is obvious to a highly skilled player is not at all obvious to a beginner. Similar remarks could be made about condition (1). Given the goal of finding a way to lose at chess, the novice’s non-derivative innovation may well be plausibly taken, by that person, as having significant value relative to that aim. Someone whose intuitions indicate that this person’s chess strategy is not an example of creativity at all would need to appeal to stronger axiological conditions to support such a judgement. Perhaps it might be required that the innovation surpass the average level of instrumental success arrived at by the members of some relevant group. If novices at the game would on average come up with this or some equally effective solution, then such a standard would entail that even if the ‘get the king out early’ tactic had a kind of originality, it would fall short of being creative by virtue of its instrumental mediocrity. Those who hold that even the average performance tends to manifest creativity might, however, be disinclined to take on board this condition in selecting the explication of ‘creativity’ to be adopted in their research.

3  Novelty and its values If creativity is a species of novelty (defined as originality or priority in the devising of means or final ends) having at least some measure of instrumental value, what is the relation between these two conceptual constituents of the explicated notion of creativity? Does a successful achievement have its value partly by virtue of its novelty, or are these strictly independent conditions? Could it be the case that the sort of novelty we have identified always carries intrinsic value of its own, which would entail that the explication of creativity is honorific after all? That novelty per se is not an intrinsically valuable property (and indeed, that it is not an intrinsic property at all) was argued above. Only on a bold and implausible stipulation of ‘novel’ would it turn out that everything novel is valuable. This is, by the way, not a new point. It was put quite forcefully by Thomas Reid, who commented that “a thing may be new and yet have no agreeable quality in it” (1973 [1774]: 38). Reid adds in the same context that “Novelty is like a cypher in arithmetic which adds value to every significant figure but is of no value in itself.” We may wonder what Reid had in mind here if we consider that the

120  Paisley Livingston basic operations of arithmetic do not really work the way he suggests. He might have been thinking, not about arithmetic per se, but about a numeral scheme where 1 < 10 < 100 < 1000, etc. More recently, Bruce Vermazen (1991) has argued that the locus of value is not originality as such, but other features of actions or works. Vermazen allows, however, that originality and other valued features could jointly provide the basis on which another sort of value supervenes. Perhaps this was the sort of thing Reid had in mind. With Reid’s and Vermazen’s remarks in mind, we ask whether there are cases taking the following form: (NV) actions α and β are valuable because they both successfully realise a worthwhile end, Ω; β realises Ω in a non-novel manner; α manifests priority or originality in the way Ω is realised; therefore α’s realisation of Ω is more valuable than β’s realisation of Ω.

Some cases appear to exemplify (NV), but a closer look suggests that many if not all of them do not really do so. Suppose the action realising Ω via good old β is compared to the action, realising Ω via brand new α, and the latter is preferred because it has the added value of offering a pleasurable relief from boredom. But then the ends realised by these two actions are not really equivalent: what brand new α realised, and good old β didn’t realise, was an Ω* that turned out to be more valuable than Ω. One can also generate counterexamples to (NV) if there are cases where what is wanted is only an Ω realised by the traditional means and not some Ω produced by some new-fangled trick. The case of the Fosbury flop clearly does not match (NV) since the end Fosbury achieved using the flop was a jump higher than those he and his rivals could realise using the straddle or some other technique. It follows that the schema exemplified by Fosbury’s creative flop is not (NV) but: (NV*) β realises Ω in a non-novel manner; α manifests priority or originality of manner and realises a superior end, Ω*; Ω via β is less valuable than Ω* via α.

One could add that Fosbury’s novel technique was more valuable than the traditional one not only because it allowed him to win the Olympic event, but because he contributed to the larger end of improving athletes’ performance in the event (and that is another reason for saying that his Ω* was quite different from the Ω realised by traditional jumpers). One may grant this point while maintaining that Fosbury would have manifested creativity even if his technique had not proved exemplary for other athletes.

Explicating ‘creativity’  121

Conclusion On the account developed above, some α is a creative action or achievement just in case α manifests originality as an effective means to its end, where there is no assumption that this end is intrinsically valuable or good, either in fact or in the judgement of the creative agent. To characterise creativity as novelty in devising effective means is not to deny its importance. In many happy cases, creative actions bring ample cognitive and other rewards. Yet, creative actions and their products can also be maleficent or indifferent, which is what honorific notions of creativity fail to allow. Setting aside the honorific approach may help us detect more ways in which an overemphasis on creativity—in the sense of originality or priority—has negative consequences, such as ill-conceived and pointless innovations that are effective only in wasting time and energy or in making things worse. Although some authors go too far in condemning artistic and other innovations, it is easy to identify cases where novelty of style or manner has been purchased at too high a price. This is hardly an original point—Kant (2001: 197) famously made a similar remark in paragraph 50 of his 3rd Critique—but it is worth repeating.9

Notes 1 This characterisation of explications is attributed to Allan Ross Anderson (via Nuel Belnap) in Dupta (2015). 2 As Alain Virmaux establishes, this was not the very first film of surrealist inspiration, and some have attributed priority to La coquille et le clergyman (1928), a short film directed by Germaine Dulac and based upon a script by Antonin Artaud. Virmaux argues that it is far from obvious that the authors of Un chien andalou were indebted to the ‘chronologically very close’ work by Artaud and Dulac (1965: 121). Un chien andalou is in any case by far the more striking specimen of surrealist cinema. 3 For a relevant interview with Fosbury, see: http://speedendurance.com/2007/06/15/dick-fosburyformer-olympic-high-jumper/. 4 Thanks to Andrea Sauchelli for raising this question. 5 For some popular discussions of creative crimes, see: http://www.oddee.com/item_98270.aspx, and http://www.businesspundit.com/10-most-imaginative-criminals/. 6 Personal communication. 7 Matthew Kieran, talk given at Lingnan University, December 2013; for Kieran’s discussion of the psychology of exemplary forms of creativity, see his previous work (2014). For critical discussions of theses regarding the unity of the virtues, see Wolf (2007) and Sreenivasan (2009). 8 Stiffer conditions might be devised by weighing additional constraints on the creative party’s knowledge of antecedent achievements, or by raising the standard of instrumental value or ‘success’. 9 A version of parts of this chapter was presented at the Frontiers of the Philosophy of Literature Conference, Syddansk Universitet, Odense, Denmark in September 2015; I thank Peter Lamarque, Lanier Anderson, Catrin Misselhorn, Dorte Jelstrup, and other participants for helpful queries and comments.Thanks as well go to Andrea Sauchelli and Dorte Jelstrup for their comments on an early draft of this chapter. I am especially grateful to both Matthew Kieran and Berys Gaut for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

122  Paisley Livingston

References Abzug, M. J., and E. E. Larrabee (2002) Airplane Stability and Control, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Admowicz, E. (2010) Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1929), London: I. B. Tauris. Aristotle (2000) Nicomachean Ethics, R. Crisp (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boden, M. A. (1990) The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Boden, M. A. (2009) “Creativity: How Does It Work?” in M. Krausz, D. Dutton, and K. Bardsley (eds.) The Idea of Creativity, Leiden: Brill. Boden, M. A. (2010) Creativity & Art: Three Roads to Surprise, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brill, D. and J. Lawton (1986) Jump, Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre. Cropley, D. H. and A. J. Cropley (2013) Creativity and Crime, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cropley, D. H., J. C. Kaufman, and A. J. Cropley (2008) “Malevolent Creativity: A Functional Model of Creativity in Terrorism and Crime,” Creativity Research Journal, 29:2, 105–115. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996) Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York: Harper Perennial. Dupta, A. (2015) “Definition,” in E. N. Zalta (ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/definitions/. Gaut, B. (2009) “Creativity and Skill,” in M. Krausz, D. Dutton, and K. Bardsley (eds.) The Idea of Creativity, Leiden: Brill. Gaut, B. (2014) “Mixed Motivations: Creativity as a Virtue,” in A. O’Hear (ed.) Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, vol. 75, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grant, J. (2012) “The Value of Imaginativeness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 90:2, 275–289. Hallion, R. P. (2003) Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age, from Antiquity through the First World War, New York: Oxford University Press. Hausman, C. R. (2009) “Criteria of Creativity,” in M. Krausz, D. Dutton, and K. Bardsley (eds.) The Idea of Creativity, Leiden: Brill. Kant, I. (2001) Critique of the Power of Judgment, P. Guyer (ed.), P. Guyer and E. Matthews (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaufmann, G. and M. A. Runco (2009) “Knowledge management and the man­ agement of creativity,” in T. Richards, M. A. Runco, and S. Moger (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Creativity, London: Routledge. Kieran, M. (2014) “Creativity, Virtue and the Challenges from Natural Talent, IllBeing and Immorality,” in A. O’Hear (ed.) Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences

Explicating ‘creativity’  123 of Art: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, vol. 75, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matthews, P. (2012) Historical Dictionary of Track and Field, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. McLaren, R. B. (1993) “The Dark Side of Creativity,” Creativity Research Journal, 6:1–2, 137–144. Merton, R. K. (1957) “Priorities in Scientific Discovery,” American Sociological Review, 22:6, 635–59. Novitz, D. (1999) “Creativity and Constraint,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 77:1, 67–82. Novitz, D. (2003) “Explanations of Creativity,” in B. Gaut and P. Livingston (eds.) The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oliver, B. (2014) The Commonwealth Games: Extraordinary Stories Behind the Medals, London: Bloomsbury. Reid, T. (1973) Thomas Reid’s Lectures on the Fine Arts, P. Kivy (ed.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Rogers, C. R. (1954) “Towards a Theory of Creativity,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 11, 249–260, reprinted in P. E. Vernon (ed.) Creativity: Selected Readings, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Segal, E. (1970) Love Story, New York: Harper & Row. Shakespeare, W. (1917) The Tragedy of King Lear, T. Brooke and W. L. Phelps (eds.), New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Sreenivasan, G. (2009) “The Disunity of the Virtues,” Journal of Ethics, 13:2, 195–212. Vermazen, B. (1991) “The Aesthetic Value of Originality,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 16, 266–279. Virmaux, A. (1965) “Une promesse mal tenue : le film surréaliste (1924–1932),” Études cinématographiques, 38–39, 103–133. Wolf, S. (2007) “Moral Psychology and the Unity of the Virtues,” Ratio, 20:2, 145–167.

Further reading Krausz, M., Dutton, D., and K. Bardsley (eds.) (2009) The Idea of Creativity, Leiden: Brill. An excellent array of perspectives on creativity. Vernon, P. E. (ed.) (1970) Creativity: Selected Readings, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Another valuable collection of papers on creativity; includes a translation of Henri Poincaré’s (1908) ‘L’invention mathématique’, in his Science et méthode, Paris: Flammarion.

8

The value of creativity Berys Gaut

Creativity is almost invariably thought of as a valuable trait. But is that true? Can some instances of creativity be bad: for instance, is not the creativity of a torturer a bad thing? And in so far as creativity has value, what kind of value is it? Is it, for instance, an instrumental or intrinsic value? And if it is valuable, why is it valuable? How does its value relate to other capacities we value, such as spontaneity, with which it is sometimes coupled? In this paper I will address these questions, arguing that creativity has both intrinsic and instrumental value, but that it is also only a conditional value, which explains some of the puzzling cases to do with “dark” creativity, such as the torture case. I will conclude by arguing that part of the value of creativity is to be explained by the value of spontaneity. My method will be to gradually build up a definition of creativity, and examine whether and how each added component, either on its own or in interaction with other components of the definition, conditions whether creativity has value and if so what sort of value it has.

1  Disposition or capacity? Creativity is a type of disposition or trait, rather than a mere capacity. A mere capacity or ability is such that someone may possess it, even though she never exercises it. A person may have the capacity to learn Hungarian, but never learn it. A disposition or trait, in contrast, is such that it must be exercised at least sometimes when suitable opportunities present themselves. A person is not kind if she never acts in a kind fashion when kindness would be appropriate. The conditions under which the disposition is activated (the disposition-relevant conditions) need never obtain, so that the lack of its activation does not count against its possession: for instance, someone may be courageous, but have never done anything courageous, since she was never in a situation where courage was called for. But if she found herself in a dangerous situation and did not act courageously, that would count against her being courageous. Creativity is, on the criterion just advanced, a disposition rather than a capacity. If someone never did anything creative, despite numerous

The value of creativity  125 opportunities for creativity in his life, whether in his job, leisure time or everyday tasks, then that would show that he is not creative. If creativity were a mere capacity, however, he could still be creative, in the same way that someone’s turning down all opportunities to learn Hungarian would not show that he lacked the capacity to learn Hungarian. But since absence of creative activity in situations where creative activity would be appropriate or advantageous counts against someone’s being creative, creativity is a disposition.

2  Newness and value What is creativity a disposition to do? A necessary condition is that something new is produced, a condition on which almost everyone writing on the topic agrees. Something can be new by virtue of its being the first time that it has ever occurred in human history; or it can be new by virtue of its being the first time that it has occurred in the life of the person who has produced it. In Margaret Boden’s (2004: 2) terms, this is the difference between historical and psychological creativity (H-creativity and P-creativity). A child making his first drawing is doing something new for him, and it may be creative, even though his drawing looks much the same as other drawings produced by children innumerable times before him. Likewise, a mathematician coming up with a proof new to her is creative, even if it turns out that the proof had, unbeknownst to her, already been discovered. The child and the mathematician have been P- but not H-creative. I will mainly focus on P-creativity. Creativity understood as the disposition to produce P-novel, or even H-novel things, is in itself neither good nor bad. Some new things are good, such as medical cures and significant works of art. But plenty of new things are very bad news indeed. One of the primary causes of the economic collapse in 2008 was the rampant production of new kinds of financial derivatives that allowed far greater leverage than had previously been possible and were so complex that almost no-one understood them, including many of the bankers who sold them. To exclude bad and worthless things counting as creative, most writers on creativity have required a value condition to obtain in the definition as well. Boden (2004: 1), for instance, holds that creativity is “the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable.” The value condition has been echoed by many writers, including Peter Carruthers (2011: 437–8) and Teresa Amabile (1996: 35), though some have rejected it (see Hills and Bird, this volume). If we hold that creativity is a disposition to produce new and valuable things, then we remove the “bad news” cases of novelty just noted, and that makes creativity straightforwardly valuable. If, necessarily, a disposition produces valuable things, then the disposition is valuable.

126  Berys Gaut

3  Instrumental and final value Is the value of the creative disposition instrumental or intrinsic? Since it is a disposition to produce new and valuable things, activating the disposition serves as a means to producing good things, and so it has instrumental value in the same way that activating the disposition to cook has instrumental value in producing cooked food. So, the creative disposition has instrumental value. Human creativity has produced innumerable good things, including great works of art, wonderful technology and extraordinary scientific discoveries. Does it also have intrinsic value? “Intrinsic value” is used in various ways in philosophy, one of which is to designate the value of ends. For something to be valuable in this way is for it to be valuable as an end, or valuable for its own sake, as opposed to being valuable as a means, or instrumentally. Since “intrinsic value” has varying uses, I will instead refer to the value of something as an end as its “final value.” The test for whether something has final value is whether we would properly judge it to have value, even in the absence of its effects. Does creativity have final value? Here we encounter a difficulty: for if creativity is defined in terms of the production of new and valuable items (which are effects), then we cannot consider the disposition apart from its effects, for these effects are necessarily present, and hence the test for whether the disposition’s value is final can get no grip. The difficulty may be pressed by considering the verb “to create,” understood in the sense in which to create is to make something creatively (as opposed to the valueneutral sense in which someone may create a disturbance or a mess). “To create” is what Gilbert Ryle (1949: 143) called a “success” or “achievement” verb, as opposed to “task” verbs that do not require success. To create is to succeed with something, or achieve something, rather than merely to try to do something. So one cannot consider the creative disposition independently of its effects, as is required by the final value test. However, this difficulty can be met. As noted earlier, a disposition is activated only in some circumstances, in what I called the disposition-relevant ones. When we consider the disposition outside of those circumstances, we can judge its value independently of its effects and so the final value test can apply. For instance, someone may have a generous disposition, but have been deprived of all means for exercising generosity. We would consider her generosity valuable even in these circumstances; so generosity has final value (as well as instrumental value). Consider too the disposition to heal or cure people. “To heal” is an achievement verb, as opposed to “to treat,” in the medical sense, which is a task verb, and so encounters the same apparent difficulty with the final value test as does the verb “to create.” A medical doctor may have the disposition to cure people, but,

The value of creativity  127 if only healthy people surround her, she does not have the opportunity to exercise the disposition. When she is in these circumstances, we can consider her disposition to heal independently of its effects, and it is clear that we would judge that it is valuable even in this context: we would, for instance, continue to admire the doctor for her commitment and skills that constitutes the disposition, even if she could not exercise it. Does creativity have final value by this test? Consider a painter who becomes blind, or so destitute that he can no longer afford the materials and tools needed for painting. Would this painter’s creativity, no longer exercisable due to internal or external circumstances, still count as valuable? Again, the answer seems clear that it would, just as we would judge as valuable the doctor’s disposition to heal even when surrounded by only healthy people. We would, for instance, continue to admire the painter for his creative disposition, even in his unsighted or impoverished circumstances, and we would regret that he could no longer exercise it.

4  Conditional value So creativity, it seems, has both instrumental and final value. There is however a significant challenge to this claim. There appear to be cases of “dark” creativity, creativity exercised in the service of the bad, rather than the good. A creative torturer and a creative terrorist, for instance, are forces for the bad, and the world is made worse by their creativity. They are all the more dangerous because they are creative, rather than being unimaginative or derivative in pursuit of their chosen ends. In such cases, creativity seems, far from being valuable, to be very bad. Moreover, these cases threaten the definitional claim that the creative product must be valuable, for there is nothing valuable about the ruination and destruction of lives that the torturer and terrorist bring about. One response is to deny that immoral people (the torturer) and immoral artefacts (his torture instruments) can be creative. David Novitz, for instance, would describe the torturer and terrorist not as creative but as only “ingeniously destructive” (Novitz 1999: 78) and he argues that destructive things cannot be creative (Novitz 2003). But few people seem to share Novitz’s intuitions about such cases, and his argument for the impossibility of immoral creativity fails, for reasons I won’t rehearse here.1 One could drop the value condition in the proposed definition of creativity, so that novelty sufficed for creativity. But doing so would mean that things that are new in worthless ways would count as creative. Suppose that someone gathers all the green books in her house and spreads them out carefully on the roof. This probably hasn’t been done before, but it isn’t creative: it’s just plain pointless or silly.2 Moreover, something can be new by virtue of nothing so bad having been done before: the Dundonian

128  Berys Gaut poet William McGonagall is famous for writing published verses of ­unparalleled awfulness; absent a positive value condition, McGonagall would count as highly creative. So we seem to have a dilemma: either reject the value condition and admit worthless novelty as creative, or keep the value condition and reject the possibility of immoral creativity. Neither alternative is palatable. The solution is to distinguish between something’s being good (or good period, or good simpliciter, as I will also put it) and something’s being good of its kind. The creative terrorist is a good terrorist, in the sense of being good as a terrorist, because he is good at terrorising. But he isn’t good, period. The creative torture device is a good torture device, in the sense that it is good as a torture device, for it is a good thing to use in torturing people. But it isn’t good, period. When we judge that a product is creative, we don’t require that it is good period, but only that it is good of its kind.3 This being so, it does not follow that all instances of creativity are valuable, for creative products are only valuable of their kind, and the kind may be a bad one, such as terrorism or torture devices.4 It may seem counterintuitive or even paradoxical to claim that there are good terrorists and good torture instruments. But there is nothing odd here. Peter Geach (1956) distinguishes between “attributive” and “predicative” adjectives. Consider the statement that something is a grey ant; one can infer from this that the thing is grey and that it is an ant; so “grey” is a predicative adjective. If either of these inferences fails, the adjective is attributive. From the statement that something is a large ant one can infer that it is an ant, but cannot infer that it is large, since even large ants are small; so “large” is an attributive adjective. Geach claims that “good” is always an attributive adjective. I do not share that view, but Geach is certainly right that “good” in some of its uses is attributive: one cannot infer from the fact that someone is a good terrorist that she is good, or from the fact that something is a good torture device that it is good. These inferential failures belong to a larger class of inferential failures characteristic of attributive adjectives. So, far from there being anything counterintuitive or paradoxical about the use of “good” when applied to terrorists and torture devices, this use has the same logical form as do many other attributive adjectives. Creativity, then, is a disposition to produce things that are new and valuable of their kind, rather than valuable, period. It follows that not all exercises of creativity are valuable, since not all the kinds produced are valuable. However, some produced kinds are valuable, and when this is so, creativity in producing things of those kinds is valuable. Torture devices are not a valuable kind of thing, so being creative in producing them is not valuable. But medical devices are a valuable kind of thing, so creativity exercised in producing them is valuable. Following Kant (1993), we can

The value of creativity  129 call things that are valuable only under some circumstances “conditionally valuable,” and those that are valuable under all circumstances “unconditionally valuable.” By this test, creativity is a conditional value, since it is valuable only when the kind of item produced is a valuable one: say, a medical device, rather than a torture device. Christine Korsgaard (1996) has argued convincingly that the conditional/unconditional value distinction is not to be conflated with the instrumental/final value distinction, since some conditional values are also final.5 For example, according to Kant, the happiness of a being is valuable only if and to the extent that she possesses a good will; so happiness is a conditional value. But happiness is not valuable only as a means, since it is also valuable as an end; so happiness is a conditional but final value. Similarly, to take Korsgaard’s example, a work of art, say a painting, has value only on condition that it is experienced (or could be experienced): but nevertheless, we value works of art for their own sake, rather than merely instrumentally (that is, merely as means to producing experiences). So paintings have conditional value, but also final value; of course they have instrumental value too, since the experiences they provide may be valuable. Thus, some kinds of values are conditional, final and instrumental. Creativity is one of those kinds of value. (It does not matter whether you find these two examples plausible, but only whether you agree that some values have this structure.) It follows from the conditionality of creativity’s value that we should not celebrate creativity in the unqualified manner in which we frequently do so. Some exercises of creativity are bad, in the sense that they make the world a worse place. In some possible worlds, all exercises of creativity would be bad. Imagine a hell-world in which everyone is malevolent, so that increasing their creativity would make them more effectively awful. Parts of the actual world are hellish, and the degree to which this is so is an empirical matter. So it is an empirical matter whether overall increasing creativity will make the world a better place. It is certainly not a necessary truth that it will, since creativity is a conditional value, and only when the conditions of its being valuable are fulfilled is it also a final and instrumental value.

5  Creativity as a kind of agency So far, I have been following the implications for the value of creativity of the newness and value conditions in the definition of creativity. There are further definitional conditions. If all that were required to be creative were a disposition to produce new things that are valuable of their kind, then the oyster that produces a beautiful new pearl, the tree that produces an elegant and distinctive canopy of leaves, and the tectonic movements that produce valuable and unique diamonds would count as creative. But none

130  Berys Gaut of these things is creative. And this is because none of them is an agent. Creativity is something whose exercise we praise, and we do not praise anything other than agents and their products. It is a central tenet of the agency theory of creativity that I defend (Gaut 2010b) that only agents and their products can be creative (contrast Boden, this volume). If agency is a requirement for creativity, how should we understand the connection? Merely being produced by an agent—being the product of an agent-involving event—cannot suffice. Suppose that Anne suffers a spasm in her arm and this causes her to knock over a pot of paint, which produces a beautiful and new pattern. She has not been creative: it was purely a matter of luck that the pattern turned out this way, and we do not praise people for things produced purely by luck. Anne’s spasm was an occurrence in an agent, but it was not an act, since an act is intentional under some description (Anscombe 1963; Davidson 1980: 43–61), and Anne’s spasm was not intentional under any description. So does the production of novel and valuable things by acts suffice for creativity? Suppose that Brian acts with the intention of leaving the room and in so doing brushes against the pot of paint; when it crashes to the ground it also produces a beautiful new pattern. Brian has acted, for he behaved with the intention of leaving the room, but he is still not to be credited with creativity. This is because his action was, in respect of the production of the pattern, entirely accidental. So, since the accidental is what is not intended, the content of the intention of the productive act matters to whether its product and agent are creative. What is this content? Consider Splash, a two-year-old boy. Seated at a table with a piece of paper, a brush and a paint pot, he proceeds enthusiastically to create a complete mess, enjoying the sheer pleasure of splattering the paint around. Some of it gets on the paper, a lot on the table, and not a little on the walls. He pays no special attention to what is on the paper, or indeed any paint pattern that results from his actions, but continues piling on paint everywhere in exuberant enjoyment. Eventually he grows tired and bored, and stops. When his mother pulls up the paper from the table, there is one of those new and beautiful patterns that keep, amazingly, recurring in our examples. Has Splash been creative? He might have been creative in producing a mess, because that was his intention and he was certainly aware of the paint splashing around. But he has not been artistically creative, since he never had any awareness of the artistic values instantiated in his painting: their occurrence was a matter of pure luck, the result of the happy chance that his disruptive activities produced something with artistic value.6 To be creative, then, an agent’s actions have to have some sort of intentional connection with the kind of values for which he is being credited as being creative: his actions have to “hook up” with these values in the right

The value of creativity  131 way. So the condition in the definition of creativity—that the product is valuable of its kind—has to figure in the correct way in the agent’s actions. What is that way? Mere awareness does not suffice, for suppose that Splash becomes aware of the artistic values of his painting, just as he is aware of the traffic noise outside the house, but he ignores the artistic values, just as he ignores the noise. He has still not been artistically creative. Suppose, in a third scenario, that Splash, now grown older and wiser, starts to pay attention to the artistic values of what he does: he becomes aware, perhaps, of a rather pretty colour combination on his piece of paper, and seeks to add to it, varying its properties, and attends to the result. When he gets something that he likes, he stops of his own accord. We can at last call him artistically creative. What entitles him to the accolade is that he takes the production of certain artistically valuable properties as his aim, and that aim guides his actions. To put the same point differently, Splash’s reason for acting in the way he did was to produce something artistically valuable. So to be creative in some kind of activity, say an artistic kind, the agent must be guided by the values of that kind of thing, that is, take as her reason for acting the production of values of that kind. She must be guided in her actions by reasons of the relevant kind.7 What is required for this guidance? More than awareness of the values is needed, as we saw, since those values might be ignored by the agent. And awareness of those values together with exercising a capacity or ability to produce those values does not suffice, even when the capacity is triggered by the awareness. Suppose that Flash, an adult artist, has in mind a new kind of painting that is both seductively sensuous and vibrantly tense. Despite repeated failed attempts to produce a painting of this kind, he is so enamoured of his vision that he loses concentration and drops his pots of paint on the floor; and they happen to produce a painting of the very kind that he had been trying to produce.8 Flash has aimed at the production of an artistic value, his action is explained by that aim, and he has exercised the capacity to realise the aim—for he must have the capacity to produce the new kind of painting, since he actually did produce it. But Flash has not been creative. So aiming to produce some values, exercising the capacity to realise them, and the aim triggering the exercise of the capacity do not suffice for being creative. Flash’s problem is that he did not know how to produce the intended outcome, and it was only luck that secured it for him. Therefore what is also required to be creative is that one exercise knowledge of how to produce something with the relevant values, that is, one must understand how to produce them.9 Only then can one’s actions be guided by the appropriate reasons.10 Now one important kind of knowledge-how is skills; it is often possible for someone to act for reasons only because she has the skills to guide her actions by the relevant reasons.

132  Berys Gaut So, to be creative, an agent must aim to produce a certain range of values, and must have some understanding of how to do so. She must thus exercise her agency in a way sensitive to the values, so that her reason for acting is to instantiate them, which is possible only because she knows how to instantiate them. One may object to these examples that they mistakenly assume that chance can play no role in artistic production. But the painter Francis Bacon, for instance, sometimes flung paint by hand at his canvases in the process of painting them, and on at least one occasion completed a painting by throwing paint at it (David Sylvester 1993: 90–4). Chance played a significant role in his artistic process. However, Bacon usually employed the flung paint as a starting point, a source of ideas, and subjected it to further painterly manipulation; on the occasion when he ended with the flung paint, it was because, as he said, “it looked right” (94). So, Bacon employed chance as part of an intentional process that was sensitive to painterly values, including intentionally letting certain areas stand, since they worked artistically. The examples I gave, in contrast, were ones where chance was the only factor in the process, or relevant part of the process, and so there was no room for crediting someone with creativity. We don’t credit people for things that are entirely a matter of luck. The creative process can use chance elements, and the creative output may be better because of these elements; but it cannot consist entirely of chance elements. A second objection concerns the requirement that to be creative one must intend to produce the relevant range of values. Does that not drive us to an unacceptable intentionalism about the interpretation of artworks, indeed an intentionalism against which I have argued elsewhere (Gaut 2010a: ch. 4)? But my claims are about creativity, not about the interpretation of artworks: creativity is only one of the properties that we ascribe to artworks, as well as to many other things and activities. Moreover, it is not part of my case that to be creative an artist must intend to produce all of the artistic values that her work exemplifies. That would entail that if an artist were not aware of a particular value of her work, say the intensity of the interaction between two colours in a painting’s background, we could not give her creative credit for it. That is too strong a requirement for creativity: could even Shakespeare have been aware of all the subtle values, some depending on complex interpretations, which critics have found in his work? So the requirement should be the more modest one that the creative person intends to produce at least some of the values of her work, and we can leave it to critics’ understanding to determine what that involves in a particular context.

6 The value of creative agency I earlier argued that creativity is a disposition and have just argued that it is a disposition that only agents, exercising their agency in a relevant

The value of creativity  133 reasons-sensitive way employing appropriate knowledge-how, can be properly said to possess; it follows that creativity is an agential disposition. In one sense of the term “virtue,” creativity is therefore a virtue. However, unlike paradigm virtues such as moral ones, it does not require an intrinsic motivation, that is, a motivation to carry out the actualisation of the disposition for its own sake, as the kind person acts for the sake of kindness (Gaut 2014). Not all virtues are unconditional goods: courage is not, for the courage of the terrorist does not make the world a better place. But virtues are typically final goods, which also have instrumental value; we have seen that this is true of creativity. What does the agential aspect of creativity contribute to its value? Agents act to actualise values by using their knowledge of how to do so. This enables them far more reliably to produce new and valuable items than can non-agential beings. Consider the incessant war between man and microbes: we are under continuous attack by microorganisms, and have developed a range of antibiotic drugs to help combat them. These drugs have been developed using our agential capacities, our ability to aim at worthwhile results and deploy elaborated forms of knowledge to achieve them, and they have been produced in a short span of time. On the other side of the war, microbes have produced through mutations new variants that are valuable to them, some of which are resistant to our antibiotic drugs. But those variants were not produced by the microbes’ intentions, for they have none, nor by deploying and elaborating knowledge. Rather, in a population of untold trillions of microbes across a vast number of generations there emerged by chance a few genetic mutations that happened to confer resistance to some of our drugs. We are not guaranteed to win the microbial war, as the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria shows, but the striking fact is that a small number of humans can, within one or a few generations, do what bacteria require a vast number of organisms and generations to do. We accomplish that by exploiting our agential capacities of forming intentions and developing knowledge, to generate and test new and valuable drugs. So creativity, as an agential disposition, has instrumental value in massively increasing the rate and reliability of production of new and valuable things. It also has final value since we admire agents for their agential disposition to produce those things.

7  Creativity as a kind of spontaneity The agential aspect of creativity also enhances the final value of creativity in other respects. I turn now to examine one of these, and show that there is a constitutive connection between creativity and spontaneity. To see this, consider first the relation of creativity to ignorance.

134  Berys Gaut Could, say, a poet know in advance of being creative in composing a poem what precisely the poem that she produces will be like? If she did, then at the point when she composed the poem it would not be new to her, and so she would not have been creative in composing it then. So she cannot know precisely what the poem will be in advance of creating it, and therefore cannot know in advance precisely the end at which she aims. This relationship between creativity and lack of precise foreknowledge has been noted by several philosophers: for instance, Collingwood sees the artist as engaged in the expression of emotion, which is “a directed process: an effort, that is, directed upon a certain end; but the end is not something foreseen and preconceived …” (1938: 111); he contrasts the artist with the craftsman, who has precise foreknowledge of the result he aims at (1938: 16). Vincent Tomas also argues that “To create is to originate. And it follows from this that prior to creation the creator does not foresee what will result from it.” (1958: 4). Though these formulations have been influential, they are not quite right. Someone could still be creative, while knowing the exact end at which she is aiming, provided that she did not know the exact means to bring about the end. Consider architectural plans: presented with one, a building engineer can know precisely what is aimed at, but still be creative in finding the means to build the structure. So, being creative is inconsistent with the state of precisely knowing both the exact end and the means prior to being creative. There is an a priori principle about creativity, which I call the Ignorance Principle: (IP) If someone is creative in producing some item, she cannot know in advance of being creative precisely both the end at which she is aiming and the means to achieve it.

IP is a principle governing, amongst other things, actions, since it concerns both means and ends, which actions possess. IP is an analytic truth. The definition of “creativity” incorporates a newness condition, and this requires that the item produced is new to its creator at the time of her being creative. (This is even true of H-creativity, since being H-creative entails being P-creative.) In creatively producing an item at time t1, the creative person cannot know at some earlier time, t0, the exact nature of the item and how to produce it, for then she would have been creative at t0, rather than t1.11 In contrast, consider someone doing something uncreative, which I will call “fabricating.” For instance, contemplate a joiner making a chair of a kind he has made very many times before. The joiner can know precisely in advance the exact end at which he is aiming (all the features of the chair)

The value of creativity  135 and the exact means to produce it (the steps he will take to make it). So we get the principle: If someone is fabricating some item, she can know in advance of fabricating it precisely both the end at which she is aiming and the means to achieve it.

It follows from IP that the creative person cannot have an exact plan of what she will do prior to being creative. A plan to do something requires not only the specification of an end but also of a means to bring about the end. If I have only an end in mind, that does not yet constitute a plan, since I may have no clue about how to bring about that end. Merely aiming to buy a Lamborghini does not yet constitute a plan for doing so, since I would also need to know how, for instance, I am to get the money to buy it. Since plans require the specification of both means and ends, precise plans require precise specification of both; so the IP rules out the creative agent’s having an exact plan of what she is to do prior to the moment of creation.12 Consider next the concept of spontaneity. Things can be said to be spontaneous in several ways: for instance, the self-combustion of certain chemical mixtures is spontaneous, in the sense that their combustion does not require the presence of an external factor. In a second sense, thoughts that come to someone unbidden are said to be spontaneous, in the sense that they occur independently of her will. In a third sense, I do something spontaneously if I do not plan it in advance, but do it on the spur of the moment. It is this third sense that concerns us. In this sense, actions that are not completely planned in advance have an element of spontaneity. Putting together these points, if an activity is creative, IP applies to it; if IP applies to an activity, the activity cannot be precisely planned in advance; if an activity cannot be precisely planned in advance, it has an element of spontaneity. It follows that creative activity must have an element of spontaneity. The necessary connection of creativity to spontaneity provides a further element in our account of the value of creativity. For we value spontaneity, and indeed it has the same features of having conditional, instrumental and final value as does creativity. Spontaneity is not an unconditional value. If Alf angers Bert and Bert spontaneously punches Alf in the face, Bert’s spontaneous act is not a valuable one. Spontaneity has, however, instrumental value. Imagine that we were to completely plan our actions in advance, so they exhibited no spontaneity whatsoever. Then the world would forever be undoing our plans, for unexpected things happen. Spontaneity has instrumental value in empowering

136  Berys Gaut us to navigate around a world where the unexpected is commonplace. Michael Bratman (1987: ch. 3) in his planning theory of intention, notes that we often have to plan in advance because of our limited cognitive resources: if we waited until the moment was upon us to decide what to do we would often not have the time to make a good decision. And for the same reason, we cannot rely on complete planning: for to say that unexpected things happen is to say that our expectations are sometimes confounded, and that is because we do not have the divine-like power of perfect prescience. God could plan exclusively with no element of spontaneity. We cannot. Spontaneity also has final value. For consider a world that is entirely predictable to our cognitive powers. In such a world there would be no need for spontaneity: planning would suffice. Suppose we lived in such a world and planned exclusively, losing our ability to act spontaneously. Would we have lost something worth having? We could not regret its loss on the instrumental grounds that we thereby did not secure some good effects, for those effects, of acting competently in the world, are still present, but they are now secured by complete planning. Nevertheless, it seems that we would still regret our inability to act spontaneously, so our regret would be grounded on the loss of something that has final value. That we value spontaneity as an end is also shown by our attitude to improvisation in the arts. The jazz writer, Ted Gioia, argues that improvisation is essential to jazz, and that improvisation is spontaneous (Gioia 1988: 33). As he notes, there is a puzzle as to why we value improvised music, since it seems doomed to be a second-rate, imperfect art, compared to composed music, for improvisations are prone to technical mistakes and aimless passages (68). To elaborate on his point, composition, it seems, must always be at least as good as improvisation in producing a work, since there is always an opportunity to revise the work when one plans it in advance of its performance. A composer may decide not to revise her first thoughts, in which case the work is no worse than if it had been improvised; but if the composer decides to revise her piece, and she knows what she is doing, then the work would be better than its improvised equivalent. Composed works are always at least as good as improvised works, and will frequently be better. So why value improvised music? The answer is that we value musical works, like other artworks, as achievements, and therefore as valuable given the conditions under which they are produced. If there are two identical sound structures, one composed and the other improvised, then the improvised one is, other things equal, the greater achievement, since it is harder to produce something on the spur of the moment than when one has multiple opportunities in composition to create and revise it. In this example, the effects, considered independently of the generative actions, are the same since the musical

The value of creativity  137 structures are the same. But we value the spontaneous work more highly as the greater achievement, so it follows that we must ascribe final value to spontaneity. Our practices of music making and appreciation therefore show that we value spontaneity as a final value. Since we value spontaneity, and creativity involves an element of spontaneity, part of the explanation for the final value of creativity lies in its dimension of spontaneity. The value of spontaneity is conditional, instrumental and final, as is the value of creativity. And creativity involves a kind of spontaneity in producing things that are new and valuable of their kind. We previously saw how the newness and value elements contribute to the value of creativity. Adding the agential, and in particular the spontaneous, aspect of creativity contributes a further element in showing how creativity inherits the value of spontaneity. I am not claiming that all spontaneous acts are creative: Bert’s spontaneously punching the annoying Alf was not. Nor am I claiming that creativity has value only in respect of its spontaneous aspect, for one can be creative in planning things and things can be valuable in respect of their planned dimension. What I am claiming is that the necessary spontaneous element in creativity is a source of the value of creativity additional to the disposition to produce new and valuable products.

8 Conclusion I have argued, then, that creativity is an agential disposition involving the exercise of relevant reasons-sensitivity and appropriate knowledge of how to produce things that are new and valuable of their kind. I have also shown that this entails that all creative activities have a spontaneous aspect to them. The value of creativity is a conditional one, that is, whether it is valuable depends on the circumstances; this is because creative products are not valuable simpliciter (valuable period), but only valuable of their kind, so whether creativity has value depends on the value of the kinds of artefacts and activities produced. Creativity also has instrumental value: its exercise is a means to producing valuable things, when the conditions for their being valuable period obtain. Agential production of these good things is vastly more powerful and efficient than the production of novel and valuable entities by non-agential biological evolution. Lastly, creativity has final value, when the conditions of its being valuable obtain, since we value its exercise independently of its effects, and its final value partly depends on the spontaneous dimension of creativity. A significant upshot of the discussion is that because creativity has only conditional value, exercising it may make the world a worse place. So we should indeed celebrate creativity, but not in the unqualified way in which this is so often done.13

138  Berys Gaut

Notes 1 See Livingston (this volume) for some reasons to reject Novitz’s arguments. 2 The example is from Anscombe (1963: 26), though she uses it to make a point about intelligibility, rather than creativity. 3 I have been influenced here by Grant (2012), though his account differs in some important respects, and does not make the connection to attributive adjectives. 4 It should also be noted that things can fall under more than one kind, so the formulation of something’s being “‘good of its kind” should be understood as shorthand for “good of its kind or kinds.” Things may be creative as falling under one kind, but uncreative as falling under another. For instance, a walk by Richard Long may be uncreative as a walk but creative as an artwork; or, to take Grant’s example (2012: 276–7), an uncreative dance may be a creative way to get someone’s attention. 5 Korsgaard refers to unconditional as “intrinsic” value, but I will not do so, since “intrinsic value” is frequently used as a synonym for “final value,” and Korsgaard’s terminology risks losing the very distinction that she is defending. 6 Splash is a human analogue of the chimps discussed in my (2011: 267); Kieran’s (2014: 126–8) stroke victim is also a structurally similar case. 7 For present purposes, we can be neutral about the correct theory of the relation of practical reason to value; for a survey of the options see Cullity and Gaut (1997). 8 Flash’s case is an example of a deviant causal chain: see Davidson (1980: 79). 9 Katherine Hawley (2003) argues that knowledge involves not only the ability to succeed at something, but also being able to provide some warrant for one’s success. 10 It should also be noted that the actions that produce the values cannot consist entirely in following algorithms for the production of those values. Consider someone producing a painting by using a painting-by-numbers kit. Her actions are uncreative, but not merely because she is producing something that is already in existence. For suppose that due to a manufacturing error, the paints were wrongly mixed or the areas labelled with the wrong numbers: she might then produce something that has never been seen before and is beautiful. But she is not creative, since she was merely following an algorithm. Algorithms, being completely precise rules, allow no room for creative choice. Of course, one can be creative in inventing or choosing to follow a particular algorithm, but one cannot be creative in following it. 11 To say that IP is analytic is not to say that it is trivial, since there are informative, because not previously explicitly known, true analyses of concepts.The successful definition of some of these would have significant consequences, as is true of many of the key terms that philosophers seek to define, including “knowledge,” “virtue,” etc. 12 Cf. Carl Hausman (1975: 10–11) who writes: “The artist begins a creative process without a preconceived plan … If he were to start with such a plan, then creation already would be complete in his mind.” The ellipsis in the quotation, however, is “or concept of the exact complex of qualities in the object which he will create,” which suggests that he equates having a plan with merely having some end in view. In that case, he is making the same point as Collingwood and Tomas, and does not see the significance of the fact that plans specify means as well as ends. 13 I am grateful to Robert Audi, Matthew Kieran, and audiences at the Universities of Kent at Canterbury, Leeds and Sheffield for their comments on this paper.

References Amabile, T. M. (1996) Creativity in Context: Update to The Social Psychology of Creativity, Boulder, CO: Westview. Anscombe, G. E. M. (1963) Intention, second ed., Oxford: Blackwell. Boden, M. A. (2004) The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, second ed., London: Routledge.

The value of creativity  139 Bratman, M. (1987) Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason, Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press. Carruthers, P. (2011) “Creative Action in Mind,” Philosophical Psychology 24: 437–461. Collingwood, R. G. (1938) The Principles of Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cullity, G. and B. Gaut (1997) “Introduction,” in G. Cullity and B. Gaut (eds), Ethics and Practical Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davidson, D. (1980) Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gaut, B. (2010a) A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gaut, B. (2010b) “The Philosophy of Creativity,” Philosophy Compass 5: 1034–46. Gaut, B. (2014) “Mixed Motivations: Creativity as a Virtue,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 75: 183–202. Geach, P. T. (1956) “Good and Evil,” Analysis 17: 33–42. Gioia, T. (1988) The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture, New York: Oxford University Press. Grant, J. (2012) “The Value of Imaginativeness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90: 275–89. Hausman, C. R. (1975) A Discourse on Novelty and Creation, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Hawley, K. (2003) “Success and Knowledge-How,” American Philosophical Quarterly 40: 19–31. Kant, I. (1993) Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, third ed., trans. J. W. Ellington (eds), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Kieran, M. (2014) “Creativity as a Virtue of Character,” in E. Paul and S. Kaufman (eds), The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, New York: Oxford University Press. Korsgaard, C. M. (1996) “Two Distinctions in Goodness,” in C. M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Novitz, D. (1999) “Creativity and Constraint,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77: 67–82. Novitz, D. (2003) “Explanations of Creativity,” in B. Gaut and P. Livingston (eds), The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson. Sylvester, D. (1993) Interviews with Francis Bacon, third ed., London: Thames & Hudson. Tomas, V. (1958) “Creativity in Art,” Philosophical Review 67: 1–15.

9

The active and passive life of creativity An essay in a Platonic key Charles Taliaferro and Meredith Varie

There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive [in the mind]; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. Coleridge 1983: 124–5

We offer a high view of creativity in the spirit of Coleridge’s concept of the imagination in contrast to what Coleridge referred to as fancy. We then consider the prospects of viewing the imagination in the context of a Platonic metaphysic. Does a Platonic understanding of abstract objects eclipse or atrophy what we think of as creativity? In the Platonic schema, the play Hamlet authored by Shakespeare was the obtaining of an abstract object which we can refer to as “Hamlet” that pre-existed Shakespeare and would always exist even if Shakespeare never authored the play about the Prince of Denmark. Does this lead to an unacceptably low view of creators, making them more akin to those who make discoveries rather than those who create? We defend a hybrid Coleridgean–Platonic philosophy of creativity. We stress that our alignment with Coleridge and Plato is not in terms of exact historical reference, but in more of the spirit of both figures, as we present them.

Creativity and fantasy Let us begin with some general observations about creativity. There can be persons who are creative in all the different forms of the arts, as well as in all the great disciplines of inquiry (history, psychology, philosophy, and so on), the market place, the military, recreation, religion, in one’s family life, romance, transportation, in medicine, building, walking, speaking, in everyday interactions, in desperate rescue attempts, and so on. The term “creative” can be used in a way that is largely void of a strong commitment to values (in the context of moral realism); it would be intelligible to say of a moral anti-realist like William Irwin that he defends error theory creatively. In this chapter, however, we commend a Platonic usage, according to which when we describe a person or her activity as creative, we are recognising something that is truly valuable (something we deem admirable,

The active and passive life of creativity  141 commendable, desirable). The concept of creativity is, we believe, very close to the concept of imagination, such that in most cases of when a person is creative, we assume or recognise that the person exercised her imagination in the creative act or process. Primarily, it is the person who is creative, whereas acts and the objects produced are creative insofar as they flow from or are produced by the creative person. Overall, we believe that creativity involves some measure of uniqueness as opposed to being (merely) derivative, but that uniqueness may be quite specific to an individual. You might creatively solve a puzzle, and this is creative in your case because you were not copying some already known precedent and you had to be quite inventive in arriving at the solution. We suggest that there is an important difference between creativity and what may be called fancy or wish fulfillment. This is, in part, in accord with Coleridge’s famous contrast of the imagination and fancy: The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM….FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. Coleridge 1983: 295

Without attempting an exegesis here, we see what may be called fancy as the ease with which one’s daydreams may take no effort at all and offer little insight into matters of value. For example, we might with ease imagine our winning a relay race in the Olympics, starting a colony on Mars, swimming from Lisbon to Miami, and so on. Little is gained in such fantasies. Perhaps it is this facile way in which we conjure up fantastic images that David Hume had in mind in this passage: Nothing, at first view, may seem more unbounded than the thought of man, which not only escapes all human power and authority, but is not even restrained within the limits of nature and reality. To form monsters, and join incongruous shapes and appearances, costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects. And while the body is confined to one planet, along which it creeps with pain and difficulty; the thought can in an instant transport us into the most distant regions of the universe…But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within

142  Charles Taliaferro and Meredith Varie very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted…In short, all the materials of thinking are derived either from our outward or inward sentiment: The mixture and composition of these belongs alone to the mind and will. Hume 2007: 15–16

We are not sure whether Hume is correct about such confinement, and we are actually not sure whether, if this is correct, it would actually be a limitation at all. But we take his point that merely combining images as in wish fulfillment and fantasy does not amount to what we recognise as the value of imagination. To appreciate the limitation of fantasy, recall this well-known, amusing passage from Arthur Schopenhauer in which he laments there being a world in which all desires were met: If every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how would men occupy their lives?…Imagine this race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without any delay and keep one another without any difficulty: in such a place men would die of boredom or hang themselves…they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is. Thus for a race such as this no stage, no form of existence is suitable other than the one it already possesses. Schopenhauer 1991: 293

Whether or not Schopenhauer is right about how we might die of boredom or commit suicide in such a “paradise,” we recognise that the value we find in creativity is when the imagination is used in terrain in which there are real obstacles or impediments; effort and strain is required in admirable cases of imaginative creativity. We might truly admire a Mozart who produces works of enormous beauty and invention with little effort, but this is (in our view) the exception to the admirable creative persons and work we usually value. In fact, what we might admire in Mozart is that he was mythically able to do with ease what most us could only do with extreme industry. Mozart to one side, when it comes to the world of creative imagination, we support Friedrich Nietzsche’s conception of the importance of struggle: You want, if possible…to abolish suffering…Well-being as you understand it – that is no goal; it looks to us like an end!!…The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – don’t you know that this discipline has been the sole

The active and passive life of creativity  143 cause of every enhancement in humanity so far? The tension that breeds strength into the unhappy sole, its shudder at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, surviving, interpreting, and exploiting unhappiness, and whatever depth, secrecy, whatever masks, spirit, cunning, greatness it has been given: – weren’t these the gifts of suffering, of the disciple of great suffering? Nietzsche 2002: 116–117

To clarify: we do not maintain that a necessary condition of all fantasy and all creative imagination is that the first never involves struggle while that later always involves struggle, for someone may use what we are calling ‘fancy’ to form the image of a 101-sided polygon, which may involve struggle, whereas we have already noted that Mozart’s exercise of creative imagination apparently involved little struggle. We nonetheless maintain as a general feature in many cases, what Mozart did would involve enormous struggle for those not similarly gifted, and the polygon fantasy work would involve merely adding sides to one’s image and not require the creative insights needed to produce The Magic Flute. Another way we can look at our discussion of struggle in creative acts is the need for purpose or direction when creatively acting. Berys Gaut argues that “Being creative is incompatible with doing something purely by luck” (2010: 1040). Additionally, an agent cannot be creative if the act “displays no understanding or skill” or if the agent lacks the evaluative capacity to assess her own work and thus to know when to stop (Gaut 2010: 1040). With this framework, we can look at Mozart’s apparent struggle-free creativity as a struggle in the sense that he was not acting by luck, but rather needed to act with purpose, understanding, and skills, and with evaluative capacities. Thus, we look at struggle as a lack of pure luck and the use of understanding and skills. Under this model, Mozart did struggle despite the apparent ease with which he composed. Additionally, we rule instances of fancy out under this model; while forming the image of the 101-sided polygon may be difficult, it does not necessarily require more than luck, and unless someone is building a 101-sided building, it lacks purpose, the purpose required to make it a creative act. Dustin Stokes helps us further distinguish fancy from imagination through his theory of creative cognition. Stokes argues that imagination is the faculty of creativity, as it possesses five key features of “creative cognitive processes: non-truth-boundedness, voluntariness, affect and motivation, inference and decision-making,” and free association (Stokes 2014: 176–177). We see fancy as mere free association—regardless of how difficult it may be—while imagination is more than that. And clearly, in Stokes’ view, imagination has four features over and above free association.

144  Charles Taliaferro and Meredith Varie Needless to say, when it comes to the creative person, we come to someone who is largely a person of passion and desire, someone ready to struggle, and not at all someone who has the vacuity of the bored soul. But as we come to that part in the chapter, when we view the creative person in light of a Platonic metaphysic, have we imagined the creative person as not creative enough?

Creativity in a Platonic context In the Platonic metaphysic under review here, let us assume that there are indefinitely many states of affairs such as There being philosophers, There being unicorns, There being a Prince of Denmark who must avenge the death of his father, and so on. The first of the listed states of affairs does obtain in this world; there are philosophers. Sadly, the second state of affairs does not, while the third state of affairs is a constitutive part of a highly complex number of states of affairs that are picked out (referenced) by the use of the title “Hamlet.” These states of affairs may include temporal properties as in There being a queen who, after the death of her husband, married his brother but the states of affairs themselves are not temporal. They do not get older over time. They are not spatially extended or located in space. There are indefinitely many states of affairs; essentially, these may be identified as all possible objects of thought directed on possible events describable (in principle) in proper gerund phrases. Why think there are states of affairs? This is not the place to offer a full case for such abstracta, but we suggest two reasons for recognising them, involving truth-claims and inter-subjectivity. In terms of truth, we believe that any plausible theory of truth should take into account that there are truths such as 13.8 billion years ago, the cosmos expanded from a compressed, high temperature state. Assuming this proposition is, in fact, true, we must ask: what is it in virtue of that makes it true? We believe that it is unreasonable to explain its truth by referencing sentences or language or language-users or ideas or thoughts. That is because (setting aside the possibility of God and the angels) 13.8 billion years ago there were no sentences or language or language-users or ideas or thoughts. The problem with grounding truth in language, etc., is also brought out when we think of a time when all language, etc., perishes. In order to render these claims intelligible, it seems to us necessary to posit states of affairs. If there is the state of affairs There being an expanding universe originating from an extremely dense, hot state, we can claim that the truth of the Big Bang theory is that the states of affairs that it picks out obtained, and this truth does not depend on sentences etc. The plausibility of affirming truths in the absence of language et al, is put clearly by John Leslie:

The active and passive life of creativity  145 Imagine that the entire cosmos – every single existing thing – suddenly faded away. In the resulting emptiness, what creative factor could there be? What could bring new things into being? Even when all things had vanished, countless matters would be real. For a start, there would be the reality that the cosmos had existed. There would be no evidence for this because evidence consists of things (records, traces) and those would all have disappeared. But it would be true that a cosmos had been in existence and that you formed part of it. When once you had come to exist, nothing could destroy the fact that you had existed. There would also be the fact, truth, reality, that apples and butterflies and clouds, together with infinitely many other objects, were possibilities in the technical sense that (unlike round squares) they involved no contradiction. Even dragons would be possibilities in this sense. There would be the fact that if twice 2 clouds were ever to exist in the future, there would then exist 4 clouds. There would be the fact that the 3 groups of 5 butterflies were those ever to exist, would contain as many butterflies as 5 groups of 3. There would be countless other mathematical realities although no things remained in existence. 2007: 1

In addition to believing that these states of affairs exist because of the ­existence of truths beyond language, etc., we argue that the inter-­ subjectivity of the states of affairs themselves suggests that they do in fact exist. The existence of states of affairs provides an answer to a quandary that would otherwise be puzzling. It seems that individuals can have different attitudes to the same things (events or happenings). You might hope that the climate continues to warm your area several degrees each year because it makes the climate more moderate, whereas we fear this outcome. If there is the state of affairs Global climates continue to warm, we may directly capture the idea that the very same thing that you hope obtains, we hope will not obtain. There is no need, on this view, to cash out our having similar ideas or concepts and the like. All possible views and events or happenings already exist as abstracta, and it is up to the agents to pick out these states of affairs as those they want to obtain or not to obtain and develop attitudes towards them.1 Now, let us consider works of creativity from the standpoint of this Platonic metaphysic. We will consider first works of art, music, and literature, recognising that creative works may include scientific technologies, methods of study, and ideas. Model creative objects include Michelangelo’s David, Picasso’s Guernica, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Additionally, we recognise technologies such as Ford’s Model-T, the typewriter, and the Internet as creative objects. So how do these creative objects obtain in this Platonic metaphysic? Of primary importance is that all of

146  Charles Taliaferro and Meredith Varie these creative works existed as abstracta prior to their obtaining. That is, before Picasso painted Guernica or Mozart composed Don Giovanni, both existed as states of affairs that could be obtained but were not. The role of the artist, then, was to make the states of affairs obtain. Because the states of affairs already existed, it was not necessary that Picasso himself painted Guernica. It could have been another individual who obtained that particular state of affairs. But in the case of each creative object, the fact of the matter remains that though another creative genius could have made the state of affairs such that he would be responsible for any one of the aforementioned creative objects, the associated author was in fact the only individual to have made that state of affairs obtain. Additionally, each phase of a given creative object had its own state of affairs. So Michelangelo’s David existed as David in final form, but prior states of affairs such as There being a block of marble that will become David also existed and obtained. Michelangelo was able to affect the obtaining of all of the subsequent states of affairs that led to the final state of affairs, There being a statue David. Platonism in the philosophy of art can allow that, using ordinary language, particular works of art are picked out as the unique creations of the artist. But such ordinary language is neutral with respect to the metaphysics at issue, just as we need not employ a specific metaphysics of truth-claims and propositions to communicate with each other. The Platonic thesis comes in on the level of philosophical explanations. While it may happen that Mozart was the only artist who could have composed The Magic Flute, this is not a matter of metaphysical necessity. We can conceive of (imagine, consistently describe) someone else composing The Magic Flute or, more radically, someone else other than the person who was Mozart playing the part of Mozart (bearing all his properties) and bringing about the obtaining of the state of affairs, The Magic Flute.2 Importantly, we explicitly deny Jerrold Levinson’s thesis that a constraint of any adequate theory of music is that works of music are essentially tied to their contingent origin (Levinson 1980). However, neither do we accept Peter Kivy’s musical Platonist thesis that music is purely its sound structure; this suggests an overly syntactical approach to works of art, music in particular (Kivy 1993). The state of affairs that is picked out by The Magic Flute or Hamlet contains meaning or, if you will, a semantics, and not just a formal, syntactical structure. Thus, while we could consistently imagine someone other than Mozart composing The Magic Flute, the individual’s doing so would require her to come up with the sound structure and the semantics of the work. In this Platonic metaphysic, not only are all past, present, and future creative objects understood as the obtaining of states of affairs that pre-exist their obtaining, but all possible created objects that will never obtain also exist as states of affairs. Does that leave us with an anaemic understanding

The active and passive life of creativity  147 of creative persons? We believe it does not. We offer two arguments, one phenomenological and the other theological. Consider first the experiences of several creative persons. As mentioned above, we recognise the creative person as a person of passion, desire, and ready to struggle. Even though it was possible for individuals other than those who ultimately did make them obtain to make certain states of affairs obtain, we recognise the creative persons as such for their efforts in making that state of affairs obtain. They are active in their creation, even in cases when the creator seems to be a creative genius who creates with seemingly no work. Consider Paul McCartney’s writing “Yesterday”: I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, ‘That’s great, I wonder what that is?’ There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th – and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot but because I’d dreamed it I couldn’t believe I’d written it. I thought, ‘No, I’ve never written like this before.’ But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing. And you have to ask yourself, ‘Where did it come from?’ But you don’t ask yourself too much or it might go away…There are certain times when you get the essence, it’s all there. It’s like an egg being laid – not a crack or flaw in it. Rybaczewski n.d.

McCartney’s account may suggest a Mozart-esque ability to compose with ease and little labour. However, John Lennon recalls that though the song came to McCartney easily and nearly completely: the song was around for months and months before we finally completed it…Paul wrote nearly all of it, but we just couldn’t find the right title. Every time we got together to write songs or for a recording session, this would come up. We called it ‘Scrambled Eggs’ and it became a joke between us. We almost had it finished when we made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit and, believe me, we just couldn’t find the right one. Then, one morning, Paul woke up, and the song and the title were both there. Rybaczewski n.d.

Even in this example of highly intuitive creative process, McCartney demonstrated passion, a willingness to struggle and put forth effort, and a desire to see the piece to completion. “Yesterday” refers to the set of states of affairs that were obtained in order that the abstractum There exists a top-selling song “Yesterday” obtained. Though he claims the song came to him, we still recognise him and other creative intuits as responsible for making the state of affairs that reference their works obtain.

148  Charles Taliaferro and Meredith Varie We can see that even in the most intuitive form the creativity of the creator is not diluted on the Platonic model. But it is even more apparent that the creator and creative object are highly valued in the cases where the creator more obviously struggled to create. Consider composer Maurice Ravel’s struggle with completion and revision: There is the duo for violin and cello which has been dragging on for a year and a half, and which I decided to finish. Until then, I will not leave Montfort, and will not reply to any of the letters which are accumulating in a majestic pyramid. The day before yesterday it was completed. Only I thought that the scherzo was not what I had wanted, and I began all over again. Orenstein 1967: 477

In Ravel’s creative process, we see his struggling to finish a work. He actively decides that he wants to complete the work, and he shuts himself in until he is finished with it, only to find he needed to begin again. He made the final state of affairs obtain, and similarly made the earlier states of affairs—which he considered incomplete portions—obtain. Yet another creative process can be viewed as valuable in the Platonic metaphysic. Here we consider Stephen Sondheim’s composition process for the song “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music: We had assumed the actress we hired for Desiree wouldn’t be able to sing because she had to be glamorous. And so the vocal burden was to be on everyone else in the show. But then we got Glynis (Johns) and she could sing in a certain style, a breathy musicality. So Hal (Prince) felt we could give her a place to sing. I said, ‘Where?’ He said, ‘In the bedroom scene.’ I said, ‘The trouble is, it’s Fredrik’s scene.’ Hal said, ‘Let me fiddle with it directorially and then come see it.’ I came to rehearsal and indeed Hal had directed it in a way that Fredrik was the dramatic force, but Desiree was the emotional one. Having seen that, I was able to see a way. I wanted to use some theater images because she is an actress. I was aware that I had to use irony to prevent it from becoming sentimental, because she is not a sentimental character and the show, while full of sentimentality, is ultimately ironic, because it’s about flirtation rather than love. There’s a light, dry quality about it, rather than a sweet quality. That made me think she should ask questions rather than make statements. The first thing I did was discuss the motivations with Hal and Hugh (Wheeler, the librettist) and write a page of sentences about what she was feeling, things like ‘The hardest human thing to do is sever a relationship,’ ‘You like to suffer,’ ‘You’re afraid of your own age.’ I started with short phrases, partly because I thought someone who was wounded wouldn’t speak in long phrases. Also, Glynis’s voice is most effective in short phrases.

The active and passive life of creativity  149 But it most of all had to do with Desiree being someone who doesn’t want to give in to the depth of her feelings. Freedman 1984

Here, Sondheim describes a deliberative, cooperative, and changing process. One observation leads to another, and the entire creative experience truly is a process, not a single revelation. His value as creator can too be appreciated within the Platonic metaphysic. Additionally, we note the varied creative experiences that are effectively represented within the Platonic system. The experience of the creator is not altered in our viewing creativity as a process of making certain pre-existing states of affairs obtain through their work, passion, and struggle. Creativity is not at all devalued in adhering to the Platonic model. All possible things the artist might do are such that there would be states of affairs for each, and their work lies in making these states obtain. We have defended our position based on a phenomenological point. Our position might be challenged on a theological point, whereas it is actually strengthened. So, at first, our position on creativity may seem to imply that, in the Abrahamic theological tradition, God as Creator diminishes in value. Traditionally, God is thought of as creating the cosmos and sustaining it in being. This is a creation from nothing (creation ex nihilo); God does not work from matter and energy that was already in place in fashioning the cosmos. Our Platonic metaphysic may make it appear that God had to use some prior, antecedent “equipment” in the exercise of creativity. If we imagine God creating time at the same time as creating the cosmos, the Platonist winds up with the view that “prior” (in the order of causation) to creation all possible worlds existed. God’s creation then comes to be about God bringing about a possible world. Doesn’t this fall short of what we would expect theologically in which God exercises radical, unsurpassable creativity? We believe this is a legitimate worry and respond in what follows, but we offer this without a fully developed philosophical theology, as this chapter would not be the place for such an ambitious enterprise. We set out to offer enough, however, to show that this objection is not (in our view) decisive or persuasive. In response, we propose that the Platonic theist offers us a defensible, coherent account of creation as opposed to one that borders on incoherence. In the Platonic Christian tradition, the concept of God creating out of nothing can be misleading insofar as it suggests God takes nothing and makes something of it. There is also something misleading in construing divine creation as an act of sheer volition without prior thought. In classic theistic tradition, as influenced by Augustine, the full panoply of Platonic abstracta are seen as divine ideas or “located” within the mind and nature

150  Charles Taliaferro and Meredith Varie of God. In this sense, God creates based on the divine knowledge of indefinitely many states of affairs. The creative act is in the making of some states of affairs obtain and not others. There is a sense, then, that in theism God creates out of God (ex Deo or out of the being of God). This, then, becomes the way in which theologians can uphold the principle nil volitum quin praecognitum (there is no willing without thinking). Without a logically antecedent (even if temporally coincident) idea of what God is creating, God’s act of creating will utterly fail in terms of the content and specificity. Imagine God wishes to bring into being and sustain the world described in the book Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince). To make sense of this, it is not enough to think that the omnipotent God wills that there be a planet with a tree and a fox and a little boy. At the level of generality, this would not explain the coming to be of the particular kind of planet, the kind of tree, the particular fox, and the particularity of the boy. Put in technical terms, creation is accountable in theism only insofar as the will of God is understood to cover the determinates of creation not just that which is determinable. A ‘determinate’ refers to the particular, e.g. a specific shade of blue, whereas a ‘determinable’ refers to the general kind or type of thing, e.g. being a colour. On a human scale, we would not have a good account of why Michelangelo painted the Sistine Ceiling if our only explanation was that Michelangelo set out to do something creative, and we would lack a good account of creation if we similarly construed the object of the divine will with similar vagueness. We propose that our Platonic model offers a fuller, richer understanding of God the Creator as creating based on the great plenitude of abstracta which may be seen as part of the Divine mind or nature. We have thus defended our Platonic view of creativity on a phenomenological and theological point. In summary, we have set out to offer an overall account of the nature and value of creativity and then sought to defend the compatibility of this account with a Platonic metaphysic. Creative individuals are passionate, driven, and willing—though not required—to struggle. We distinguish creativity from fancy by identifying the obstacles that interfere with achieving the objects of each. And, finally, despite the fact Platonic metaphysic may seem to devalue creativity, we have demonstrated that it in fact does not.

Notes 1 For a recent publication in metaphysics, see “Abstract Objects: Bringing causation back into contemporary Platonism” by Charles Taliaferro appearing in Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia.To clarify, we hold that the states of affairs exist and that different attitudes may be directed upon them.  Additionally, in response to the question [from an editor] about whether the different attitudes to states of affairs are themselves states of affairs, we respond: When you contemplate the state of affairs of There being unicorns, you are not a state of affairs.  Presumably, you are a concrete individual subject. 

The active and passive life of creativity  151 Nonetheless there is the state of affairs of There being a subject who contemplates the state of affairs of There being Unicorns.  That state of affairs may exist and either obtain or not obtain. 2 For a sustained defense of the use of thought experiments as a guide to justified beliefs about what is metaphysically possible, see “Sensibility and possibilia: a defense of thought experiments” by Charles Taliaferro (Philosophia Christi 3 [3]: 403–2 [2001]).

References Coleridge, S.T. (1983) Biographia Literaria, J. Engell and W.J. Bate (eds.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Freedman, S. (1984) The Words and Music of Stephen Sondheim, New York: New York Times Company. Gaut, B. (2010) “The Philosophy of Creativity,” Philosophical Compass 5 (12), 1034–1046. Hume, D. (2007) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, S. Buckle (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kivy, Peter. (1993) “Platonism in Music: Another Kind of Defense,” in The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 59–74. Reprinted from American Philosophical Quarterly 24 (3), 245–52 (1987). Leslie, J. (2007) Immortality Defended, Oxford: Blackwell. Levinson, Jerrold. (1980) “What a Musical Work Is,” The Journal of Philosophy 77 (1), 5–28. Nietzsche, F. (2002) Beyond Good and Evil, R.J. Hollingdale and J. Norman (eds.), J. Norman (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orenstein, A. (1967) “Maurice Ravel’s Creative Process,” The Musical Quarterly 53, 467–481. Rybaczewski, D. (n.d.) “Yesterday,” History, Beatles Music History: The In-Depth Story Behind the Songs of the Beatles. Available from: http://www.beatlese books.com/yesterday Schopenhauer, A. (1991) Parerga and Paralipomena Volume 2, E.F.J. Payne (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stokes, D. (2014) “The Role of Imagination in Creativity,” in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, E.S. Paul and S.B. Kaufman (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

10 Artistic creativity and suffering Jennifer Hawkins

Can negative psychological experiences be good for a person? If so, what could possibly be good about them? And when and under what circumstances might they be good? In what follows, my aim is to begin a philosophical exploration of these issues by focusing on a particular case—the relationship between negative affective experience and artistic creativity. There is a strong, empirically documented link between artistic creativity and psychiatric mood disorders (Jamison 1996; Andreasen 1987; Richards et al. 1988; Jamison 1989; Ludwig 1994; Post 1996; Kaufman & Baer 2002; Kyaga et al. 2011; Kyaga et. al. 2013). Though no one knows why, it is now well-established that poets, fiction writers, visual artists, and musicians are much more likely than ordinary people to suffer from either manic-depressive illness (bipolar disorder) or unipolar depression.1 To give but one example, Jamison (1996) found rates of depression eight to ten times higher in artists and writers than in the rest of the population. In addition, some people believe that the link between artistic creativity and mental illness may be tight: that darkly negative moods may turn out to be necessary for artistic creative expression (Jamison 1996). If this were true,2 it would raise interesting questions about prudential value, i.e. about what is (extrinsically) good for certain creative individuals.3 Many people not only value the creative products of others, they value being creative. Indeed, most people assume that an individual’s production of works of art is something that is good for her. But if creative production is good for a person and negative experience bad—though necessary for creative production—this raises interesting, highly complex questions about whether and when such experiences may be all-things-considered worth it. These are not merely abstract questions. Consider issues relating to treatment. Creative individuals who have recurring bouts of major depression or of manic-depressive illness are typically candidates for psychiatric treatment that, in many cases, could eliminate or at least seriously mitigate their suffering. Yet, such individuals sometimes choose to forgo treatment, particularly medication. The reasons are complex. Not all people respond to current medications, and many medications have side effects unrelated to creativity (e.g. weight gain,

Artistic creativity and suffering  153 dry mouth, tremors, loss of libido) that individuals understandably dislike.4 But it remains true that many people are wary of medication because they fear the effects of treatment on their creative lives. If that is so, then even if we develop new medications that lack the unpleasant side effects, such worries will persist. Some people can’t understand how negative experiences of the sort tolerated by such individuals could have value. Surely, they assume, a person with a severe mental illness should welcome anything that might curb it. However, as a general conclusion this is too strong. It reveals a lack of insight into the many different things individuals value about their lives, including the very real value that artistic productivity adds. However, the opposite general conclusion—that anything is worth enduring for the sake of art—is equally unjustified and equally lacking in insight. Still, some people adopt it. There are people who are virulently anti-treatment and who seem to assume that creativity is a kind of sacred value, not to be weighed against, or compared with, any others. This latter mentality is well-illustrated by an anecdote from the psychiatrist Peter Kramer. Kramer reports that when he was giving talks about his book Listening to Prozac, he repeatedly encountered the same question. “With discouraging reliability,” he reports, someone from each audience would ask, “What if Prozac had been available in van Gogh’s time?” (2005: 31) In each case, the question was presented as a challenge, as a kind of reduc­ tio of the claim that medication to relieve negative psychological states is typically good. The questioners assumed that there was at least one clear set of cases where medication would not be good, namely, cases involving artists. Although the point was partly about how the widespread use of medication among artists would not be good for the rest of us (because we would collectively lose so much great art), it was also clearly meant to underscore the badness of medication for individual artists themselves. In what follows, I shall set aside concerns about the good of others and focus on the question of when (if ever) negative experiential states might be good for a particular creative individual. I take it that concern for the individual morally trumps concern about the value for the world of great art. If a particular life path would be (overall) bad for someone, or significantly worse for her than some other easily available path, then we should not encourage her to pursue the worse path, even if great art is thereby lost. Proper concern for an individual requires concern for her welfare for its own sake. Of course, individuals themselves may wish to pursue certain goods knowing that the pursuit is against their own best interests. I do not assume that most people do or even ought to care most about their own good. A few clarifications are necessary. First, it is important to distinguish between negative affective experience and suffering. I use “negative experience”

154  Jennifer Hawkins and similar terms to refer to the broad category of negative affective states and reserve the word “suffering” for the more extreme forms of such experience. Since both refer to psychological states, neither is the same as adversity. Adversity is non-mental and refers to negative events in a person’s life, the kinds of events that make a life difficult such as illness, poverty, or unfortunate accidents. Though adversity can and often does lead to negative experience, and even suffering, this is not always the case. Many discussions of the lives of creative people run together adversity and negative psychological experience. We are all familiar with stories about famous artists who have had to endure many hardships on the way to success. Poverty and lack of recognition are common, which is why the phrase “starving artist” has become a familiar trope. But not all artists who experience hardships suffer. My question is not about the value of hardship. It is a general question about the value of negative psychological states, and a particular question about the value (if any) of intense psychologi­ cal distress. Second, although I focus here on questions about prudential value or well-being, I neither argue for, nor assume the truth of, any particular theory of well-being. I do assume that psychological states are among the things that matter prudentially, but not that they are the only things that matter.5 In what follows, I want first to consider what it would take to establish that negative psychological experiences (of any sort) have significant extrinsic value. More specifically, what would we want to know before choosing to endure such experiences for the sake of some other good? I also want to develop a framework to help us distinguish between different types and levels of negative psychological experience and then ask of the more extreme forms of negative experience whether they are ever worth enduring. Ultimately, I argue that it can only rarely (if ever) be worthwhile to endure suffering for the sake of creativity (or for that matter any other good).

1 What sort of connection? What is the connection between negative experiential states and creativity? No one is sure exactly, since there is so much conflicting data. Still it is possible to say a bit by way of clarifying the possibilities. First, however, I need to address a couple of potential confusions. To begin with, even those theorists who think there may be a necessary connection between negative experiential states and creativity do not claim that this is a connection that holds for all creative people. Obviously there are many creative people who never exhibit any signs of mental illness or even signs of milder negativity. So the claim cannot be that negative

Artistic creativity and suffering  155 affective experience is generally necessary. Rather, the idea is that for particular individuals—given the way they are constituted—it might turn out that negative affect is a necessary part of the path they must follow to realize their creative potential. For these individuals, even if not for others, there is no path to creative expression free from (some degree of) psychological disturbance. Second, the claim that negative affect might be necessary for creativity is not the claim that periods of negative affect are themselves periods of creative production. It is well-known that most people produce little or nothing during depressive episodes. As Kieran (2014) reminds us, “Virginia Woolf could barely write when depressed, Van Gogh was unable to paint when in seemingly similar states and Coleridge suffered a deeply paralyzing writer’s block for years due to anxiety.”6 The general idea with respect to artistic creativity is just that negative experiences might be part of the path that leads to creative production, where the production in question could just as easily occur at a later time, once the person is no longer severely depressed or anxious. The negative affect and the creative production need not occur simultaneously (Richards 1981; Jamison 1996). There are several different ways one might think about the relationship between negative affect and creativity. On one view, which I shall call the bundle theory, certain individuals must pass through negative states in order to create (presumably, at some later time). On this view, negative experience does not contribute directly to the creative process, but is an element in a bundle of elements where the particular elements cannot (for whatever reason) be separated from one another (at least not currently). The individual must either accept the whole package or none of it. This might be the case, for example, if we were to discover that in certain individuals with affective mental illness, negative affect and creative thought processes were two different, independent effects of a single underlying disease process.7 We would then be interested in knowing whether we could eliminate one, but only one, of the two effects. It would be nice if this were possible. If it were, then negative affect would not be necessarily linked to creativity. But there are no guarantees that the two would be separable. It is an empirical question whether the bundle model is even the right model. But even if it were, it would be a further empirical question whether one effect (negative psychological states) could be suppressed without altering the other (the creativity). The messy reality of human biology might not allow it. If that were true, then negative affect would be (at least for certain individuals) an ineliminable part of creative production. The second view of the relationship between creativity and negative experiences is what I shall call the special ingredient view.8 On this account, negative experiences are not just by-products of something else that enables creativity—they actually contribute to creativity directly. On this view,

156  Jennifer Hawkins negative affective experiences are necessary for creative production in the way that certain ingredients are necessary for the creation of good food. More concretely, the idea is that something specific is gained or learned or acquired during the passage through negative states, something that then influences the individual’s subsequent work. Whereas on the first model negative experience is unavoidable but not a causal contributor, on the second model it is a contributor and this fact explains its unavoidability. One might wonder what could possibly be gained or acquired from negative experiences, especially deeply negative ones. Since many artists have suffered from bipolar disorders, there is a natural tendency to assume that if there is a contribution to creativity from the illness, it is a contribution that comes from the manic side (Jamison 1996: 118).9 Yet, although manic tendencies and the experiences they create may also contribute to artistic production in important ways, many artists nonetheless insist that their negative experiences—their depressions and anxieties—are key as well.10 What then might deeply negative experiences contribute? One hypothesis is that since so much artistic work is about the expression of emotion, artists who have deeper and wider experience of extremes of emotion may gain from their experiences a kind of emotional insight or knowledge that improves their creative work.11 Of course, the kinds of emotional experiences produced by affective illness are typically extreme, so one might wonder why one would need experience of the extremes to create good art. Presumably great art speaks to large numbers of people by capturing and reflecting something of their experiences, giving powerful expression to something they could not have expressed so well themselves. But if, as seems likely, the extremes of experience are not the experience of most, it is not clear why intimate knowledge of extremes would improve art or enable artists to speak to a wider audience. One possibility is that most of us can only recognize, and so can only begin to learn from and interpret, our own experiences when these are presented to us in more dramatic, larger-than-life forms. A certain degree of grandiosity and exaggeration are needed to enable us to foreground and become aware of the features of our own emotional life, features that so easily slide into the background. On this view, we become familiar with the subtleties of the human emotional landscape by having it presented to us on a grand scale. If our own appreciation for sorrow (which is an inevitable aspect of human life) is deepened by contact with work that paints sorrow in powerful ways, and if the ability to express sorrow in those ways depends on experiencing it in its extremes, then this might be an explanation of the way in which negative experience gives artists something important and essential. It is also well known that mood is relevant to the way the mind stores and then later accesses information (Morris 1999: 172–4; Schacter 1996:

Artistic creativity and suffering  157 209–212). Current mood influences what you retain now for the future and also influences now what you can access about your past. When a person is in a good mood, she focuses on and forms more memories about the positive aspects of whatever is happening to her. When she is in a negative mood, the opposite is true. But also, when a person is in a good mood, she can more easily access information about positive aspects of her past and is unlikely to spontaneously remember much that is negative. But when she is in a negative frame of mind, the opposite holds: she then has greater access to her negative memories. Because different affective states make different material accessible, some theorists have hypothesized that frequent swings of emotion might give an individual a creative advantage by giving her access to more, different memories and ideas. And indeed, fluidity of thought and the generation of numerous ideas are associated with creativity. Frequent swings might also give an individual more of an ability to adopt differing perspectives on the very same events in her life, which might also contribute to important insights. One final putative “benefit” of negative affect is worth mentioning, because I doubt it really is one. It is often said that depressed people have a more realistic picture of the world. The value of negative affect (it is said) is that it allows a person to see the world as it is, whereas others are, to a greater or lesser extent, deluded about the state of the world. This is not a new idea, but one found in many subtle variations in both literature and philosophy. The following lines from Herman Melville offer (one of many) example(s): “In [the] flashing revelations of grief ’s wonderful fire we see all things as they are, and though when the electric element is gone, the shadows once more descend and the false outlines of objects again return, yet not with their former power to deceive” (1996 [1852]: 88) On one reading, Melville is claiming that grief provides general insight into the real nature of things (“we see things as they are”). But interpreted literally, this is too strong. No doubt there is an element of truth in this idea, but only an element. No doubt part of what Melville has in mind is the way in which grief or despair can re-acquaint us with very real truths that we often ignore—for example, truths about our own mortality and the mortality of those we love. But this is compatible with the thought that negative states do not provide ‘the’ authoritative perspective on reality. The world contains both good and horrible things, and there is no reason to embrace the idea that the thoroughgoing negative perspective is correct, or even the idea that it is more congruent with how things are. Thus, although depression can put us in touch with truths we often forget, it can simultaneously put us out of touch with others. The idea that negative affect might enhance one’s ability to see things “as they are” has gained a certain currency in recent years because of the psychological thesis known as “depressive realism” (Alloy

158  Jennifer Hawkins & Abramson 1979). However, these days many psychologists are skeptical of depressive realism (Ackermann & DeRubeis 1991; Haaga & Beck 1995; Dobson & Pusch 1995; Peterson 2006: 95–6). Though I do not doubt that negative affect may have some benefits, particularly for creativity, I am deeply skeptical of the widespread tendency to over-state the case. A common theme in discussions of depression is what the psychiatrist Peter Kramer (2000) has called “the valorization of sadness.”12 Building from the idea that people in the grips of negative affect are more in tune with reality, the suffering of such individuals is then viewed as, in some sense, elevated and noble. Though they suffer, they see what the rest of us do not. We should resist such romanticized, overblown generalizations and instead look for ways to concretely assess what is gained and lost in negative states.

2  Assessing the value of negative experience Having considered how negative affect and creativity might be linked and having argued that it is at least plausible that such a link might be necessary, at least for certain people, I want to consider what this might mean for prudential decision-making. Might it ever be worth it, all-things-­ considered, to endure negative states for the sake of what is gained from them? Here, I want to offer a few, general observations about choosing negatives for the sake of positives. It is extremely important to distinguish two different perspectives we can adopt on decisions: the prospective perspective and the retrospective one. What we know prospectively is often limited, and so we must choose in the face of great uncertainty, on the basis of our best information. However, most of our experience (such as it is) with judging the value of bad events comes from the retrospective perspective. If I am trying to understand (prospectively) whether, and if so when, it might make sense to tolerate negatives for the sake of positives, I may well turn to the stories and accounts of those who have experienced similar negatives, looking to see whether they view their experiences as having been worth it. But there are potential dangers involved in listening to those who occupy the retrospective perspective. Moreover, certain questions, which it is important to consider prospectively, do not arise from the retrospective standpoint. One common barrier to thinking clearly about the value of negative experiences stems from the fact that we are—most of us, at least— strongly motivated to look for good in the midst of bad. To focus on good things and, in some cases, to create something new and good out of a bad experience is comforting. It allows an individual to feel better, to move on, and to view her own continuing narrative in positive terms. All of this is understandable, and in many instances the things it spurs individuals to

Artistic creativity and suffering  159 accomplish are admirable. But it does mean that we are inclined to think that our negative experiences have contributed to later good outcomes, even when they have not. Thus, what people say on this score should be viewed with a degree of caution. There will be tendencies to exaggerate the extent of the link and to see (with hindsight bias) more value than is really there. One extremely important question that should be considered prospectively is whether one has reason to think that the good one is aiming at will really outweigh the negatives one will have to endure to reach it. Importantly, this is the kind of question that rarely arises for those thinking about matters retrospectively. If a negative event in our life is already a given—something we cannot alter—then while we may be interested in whether the negative event ultimately contributed to something positive, we have little reason to inquire too precisely into the relative weights of the values. If we do raise such issues, we will be biased in favor of viewing the good as fully compensating the bad whether it did or not. After all, that makes for a much better, much more comforting personal story. So again, we must be somewhat cautious when it comes to accepting as guidance for our own lives the retrospective reports of others. A second important question is whether the negatives are really necessary in this case. After all, it might not be true of all individuals that they need negative affective experiences in order to be creatively productive. And even if they do need some of this, it is worth questioning whether they need the kind and degree of it that, left untreated, they will likely experience. Once again, this is not the kind of question that naturally arises from the retrospective perspective, since again, if a negative event that contributed to a good one has already occurred and cannot be changed, we have little motivation to discover whether the same good outcome might have been had with a less negative initial event. But prospectively, this makes a lot of difference. For even if we grant that it can sometimes make sense to choose suffering for the sake of some good it will help bring about, there is still no reason to endure more suffering than is strictly necessary. A third important question is whether there are other possible paths through life that will be just as good or better than the creative path, albeit different in the particular goods they contain. Suppose that an individual faces the following choice. If she remains without treatment for her depression, she will have recurring bouts of it. But during the periods when she is not depressed, she will be able to pursue her art. Suppose that if she accepts treatment, her depressions will be lifted, but that her artistic expression will be, not absent, but blunted, different, neither as intense nor as good as before. Suppose also that she would find that frustrating, so much so that if she pursues the treatment path she would really be better off overall doing something else. Finally, suppose that if she received

160  Jennifer Hawkins treatment she could pursue an interesting non-artistic career (she has the talents or abilities for that career), and she could have other goods as well—significant and long-lasting relationships and so on. In short, as I imagine it, it is possible for the person she is to find great fulfillment in other things, whether she currently realizes that or not. Although the goods in this alternative life path would be very different in kind from the artistic goods she currently pursues, it might well be that there is much more overall good for her in the alternative life. My point is simply that if that is the case, then she should pursue the alternative. Everything, of course, turns on one’s theory of well-being, and what elements one views as possessing prudential value and how much. Theorists could agree in principle to the idea that she ought to pursue an alternative non-creative path with more overall value in it, but be unable to agree on what kind of life would actually count as containing more overall value. But we should not confuse the disagreements of theorists of well-being (about what kinds of goods can compensate for which others), with the not-uncommon lay-person’s rejection of the very idea that a significantly different alternative could be just as good. It can be very tempting for an individual already launched on a particular path to assume that no other path could possibly be as good for her as the one she currently wants to pursue or is pursuing. But as theorists we should we wary of accepting such claims. There are many wonderful ways for a life to go even though much of the personal goodness of a particular type of life is only fully appreciated by those who are currently living it. This makes it hard for individuals to appreciate that possible lives quite distinct from their current one might nonetheless—if they were living that life—strike them as being just as good if not better.

3  Suffering and its place in mind I have so far pointed out various problems that confront us when we think about the value of negative experiences. We are inattentive to trade-offs, prone to retrospective biases, and sometimes tempted to valorize negative experiences. But by far the largest problem is not having a sufficiently rich vocabulary for talking about negative experiences. Most people associate the word ‘suffering’ with physical pain, but although real and important, pain is not the only form of suffering. We have too little understanding of psychological distress and no good account of which types are worse than others. As part of helping us become better at distinguishing different types of negative experience, I wish to introduce a particular kind of mental phenomenon, what I shall call a personal perspective (or just perspective, for short). To bring out some of the characteristic features of affect generally, and perspectives in particular, I will locate them in a dual-process picture

Artistic creativity and suffering  161 of mind (Kahneman 2012).13 This is a view that has come to be widely accepted among psychologists, according to which the mind has two semiindependent systems of thought. One system (System 1) is extremely fast, its processes largely (though not always) unconscious, and involuntary. The other system (System 2) is slower, more effortful, conscious, and voluntary. One of the primary roles of System 1 is to acquire and pre-sort for personal relevance information about the environment. It also offers System 2 suggestions about what to believe, whether to judge things negatively or positively, and how to act. One of the primary roles of System 2 is to take the suggestions of System 1, refine them, and elaborate upon them. It is also the job of System 2 to periodically question the offerings of System 1 and reject flawed suggestions. System 1 and System 2 are both systems of thought, which means that they are both in the business of generating representations of the world. They produce mental states with content, albeit of quite different kinds. There are several advantages to adopting this dual process picture. First, there are certain kinds of mental states that are best understood if they are characterized in System 1 terms: as fast, intuitive, involuntary. Affective processes are like this. We get something deeply wrong if we fail to understand the way in which affective phenomena are both fast, intuitive, and (for the most part) out of our control. Second, even apart from the particular characteristics of each system, it is important to recognize the existence of two systems of thought. For it is only by postulating two quasi-independent systems that we can begin to offer adequate explanations of internal mental conflict. Though the two usually work in harmony, System 1 and System 2 do not always agree. Personal perspectives are affective.14 However, a perspective is neither an emotion nor a mood. For one thing, perspectives typically last longer than either emotions or moods. But perspectives are also more basic and more comprehensive. They are more basic in the sense that a person’s perspective contributes to determining the particular emotions and moods she experiences. A perspective is more comprehensive in the sense that its ability to color our perception of the world is more extensive. Currently there is no general, agreed upon vocabulary for identifying and discussing perspectives. This is part of what I wish to change. So what is a perspective? As we saw, System 1 constantly monitors the environment and acquires information. It forms quick assessments of things it deems relevant to the individual. Some of these assessments are conscious, but even those that are not have the potential to impact consciousness in a variety of ways. However, only a sub-set of System 1 assessments are relevant to personal perspectives. These fall into three broad categories: (1) assessments of objects of care, (2) assessments of self, and (3) assessments of the future. I will explain each in turn.

162  Jennifer Hawkins Recall that our affective capacities are what enable us to care about things in the world. To care about things (in the basic sense that interests me) does not require great cognitive sophistication. We can care about people, objects, sensations, goals, activities, events, relationships, achievements, etc. Affect is what enables us to emotionally ‘latch on’ to things that we encounter in the world. For most of us, as we grow, our ability to be concerned about things expands greatly. To understand a personal perspective, however, we must focus on the smaller set of things that an individual cares about in the most basic, emotional sense. These are the things that can elicit reasonably strong emotions. The contrast should be familiar enough: suppose two children are hurt in an accident, my own child and the child of a stranger. I understand that both events are bad. But only one affects me deeply because only my child is an object of care (in this special, defined sense) for me. An individual’s personal perspective is partly shaped by the assessments that her mind makes with respect to these objects of care. System 1 constantly tracks and monitors these and anything that might affect them. In extreme cases (if an object of care is, for example, threatened), an emotional reaction may occur. But discrete emotions are the unusual event. More often there is just a stream of information coming in, which is to one degree or another positive or negative. In light of this information, slight adjustments in outlook are made. If things generally appear well with respect to the objects of care, then the person’s perspective will be more positive and she will feel better. To the extent she is aware of problems or losses, her perspective will be more negative and she will feel worse. The second set of relevant assessments are System 1 assessments of the self. These intuitive, involuntary assessments occur frequently, where the self is held up to and compared with some standard or norm. These need not be reasonable norms, or norms widely accepted by others, though they often are. In addition, some people are more likely to notice the ways in which they have exceeded norms whereas others are more likely to notice ways in which they have fallen short. The cumulative effect over time of many such self-assessments is a positive or negative self-picture, which in turn, is an element of personal perspective. A third category of assessment concerns the future. When an individual thinks about the future, does she tend to assume that things will go well or go badly? Even when a person is not explicitly engaged in trying to think about the future, many events during the course of a day will trigger at least momentary assessments of how things are likely to go, what might be about to happen: for example, how a relationship is likely to develop, how an interview is likely to turn out, whether or not a call is likely to be good or bad news. These assessments of the near and far future cumulatively contribute to personal perspective. To the extent that more such

Artistic creativity and suffering  163 assessments are negative, the person’s perspective will be more negative as well. And vice versa with positive assessments. All three types of intuitive assessment occur constantly, generating for the individual an overall picture of how things stand with respect to what matters to her. This is by no means her whole view of the world. But it is the best predictor of her emotional life. I suggest that we think of personal perspectives as existing along a continuum from highly positive to highly negative. Here is one way we might try to make this idea concrete. Presumably for any given individual, there is some total number of intuitive assessments that her System 1 makes over the course of a day. And there must be some determinate subset of these that are relevant to her personal perspective in the ways described above. Call these the perspective relevant assessments. For a given individual and a given day there must then be an answer to the question: what percentage of her perspective relevant assessments are either positive in themselves or contribute to maintaining a positive outlook? We can then locate particular perspectives along a continuum ranging from highly positive at one end (meaning that a high percentage of the perspective relevant assessments are positive) to negative at the other (meaning a very low percentage of the perspective relevant assessments are positive). On this model, we all of us, all of the time, occupy some personal perspective or other. The continuum is defined in terms of daily degree of positivity. But, of course, we are most often interested in patterns that extend over time: perspectives that persist. The framework allows us to do this if we simply plot the daily figures over time. For most people, most of the time, perspectives are relatively stable. So although the numbers for any given individual will change slightly from day to day, they will presumably tend over time to be clustered in the same relatively narrow range of the continuum, unless some dramatic shift occurs. And, of course, big shifts do occur. It is wellknown that personal events viewed by the individual as very good or very bad (e.g. success in a big project, the death of a loved one) can rapidly alter perspective. Changes can also come about because of changes internal to the person, as happens, for example, at the onset of affective illness. Once we have the idea of a continuum, we can adopt quasi-stipulative definitions of ranges. We can distinguish on the negative side between suffering and mere unhappiness, and on the positive side between mild happiness and more intense happiness. I have deliberately sought to devise a way of talking about affective perspectives that is independent of the ways in which such perspectives are generated and also independent of the extent to which the perspective tracks reality. A person can occupy a horrible personal perspective if everything she cares about is going horribly (think of someone in a concentration camp). Or she can occupy a horrible perspective because she is in the grips

164  Jennifer Hawkins of the severest of depressive episodes. The continuum I have described gives us a useful way of comparing and contrasting particular perspectives in terms of their degree of positivity and allows us to talk about the connection between individual perspectives and welfare. My thesis is simply that it is intrinsically bad for an individual to occupy a bad personal perspective, in much the same way it is intrinsically bad for an individual to be in pain. Likewise, it is intrinsically good for someone to occupy a positive one.15 Perspectives are not the only intrinsic prudential values, but they are extremely important ones. The degree of badness (or goodness) is a function of the location of the perspective on the continuum. The less positivity there is in a perspective, the worse that perspective is for the individual who occupies it. It is important to grasp that occupying an extremely negative perspective feels very bad. We just are evaluative creatures who respond well and feel well when we can “see” positives in the world. We wither in the absence of any such perception. Whereas philosophy contains much discussion of the badness of physical pain, it is all too easy for the intrinsic badness of personal perspectives to be overlooked.

4  Important errors to avoid Our lack of nuanced distinctions in negative psychology contributes to our inability to fairly assess the value of negative experiences. Knowing whether a negative experience is “worth it” requires assessing whether the prudential goods that come with it fully compensate for it. But since different negative experiences have quite different degrees of prudential disvalue, no accurate assessment is possible unless we are clear about the kind of experience in question. Two particular types of error are worth highlighting: (1) failures to distinguish between types and degrees of negative affect and (2) failures to distinguish between negative affect and negative non-affective thought. I will describe each type of error briefly. It is easy for people to confuse negative moods with negative perspectives, and to confuse mildly negative perspectives with more severe ones. We all experience negative moods. These are transient shifts within more stable affective perspectives. A negative mood occurs when an individual’s general pattern of appraisal is temporarily disrupted, resulting in fewer positive appraisals and (perhaps) more negative ones. The difference between moods and perspectives, however, is not simply temporal. Perspectives last longer, but they are also more encompassing. A person can be in a bad mood, without it affecting most of the appraisals central to her personal perspective. Moods color our perception of some things, but perspectives color our perception of many things, including the ones

Artistic creativity and suffering  165 most central to us. Similarly, it is important to realize that mildly negative perspectives are quite different from severely negative ones. It would take an incredible amount of prudential good to make it worthwhile to occupy a severely negative perspective. It is also worth calling attention to the possibility of System 1/System 2 dissonance. When we see a person prone to negative thoughts, we are usually correct in assuming that his stated thoughts are reflections of his feelings— i.e. of his negative affective perspective. After all, System 1 appraisals are usually taken up and incorporated into System 2 thinking. But sometimes System 1 and System 2 come apart. It is possible for a person to express many negative thoughts despite not feeling bad. Indeed, it is possible for an extremely negative person at the level of System 2 to be someone who is actually quite happy. Admittedly, much empirical evidence suggests that the type of person prone to negative thinking is more vulnerable to developing depression or other affective disorders. But being at risk for something is not the same as actually developing it. Consider the following case: Paul is by nature a very serious person and because of this he is not prone to displays of positive affect. He doesn’t smile a lot. He is not effusive. He works in a clinic that serves the health needs of the very poor. He has a deeply moralistic side, so if you talk to him you will hear a great deal of passionate talk about how cruel and insensitive our society is. He is frequently frustrated by people who seem (to him) to be too complacent about injustice. If you asked him if he is happy, he would say no. In large part, this is because he thinks of happy people as giddy, superficial types and he has never been like that. However, it also reflects his sense that it would be indecent for him to be happy in the face of the misery he confronts daily in his work. Nonetheless, the negative claims he makes are the expression of Paul’s System 2. His personal perspective is fairly positive. He loves his wife and she is as committed as he is to the work they do. He is getting recognition from important philanthropists for his efforts. Although he deals with many sick, distressed people, he is himself in good health and has learned to take days off and allow himself to do things he likes—a good strategy for preventing burnout. Although he claims to be pessimistic about the future, at a deeper level he is not actually all that worried. He is fairly sure his clinic can continue to operate for the foreseeable future at least as well as it has been. In short, though he denies it, and though he may superficially strike some people as unhappy, he is actually quite happy. The lesson here is important. If we take individuals like Paul as our exemplars of negative experience, we will not grasp the real plight of those who occupy negative perspectives and we will acquire a false sense of what can be accomplished by individuals who suffer.

166  Jennifer Hawkins

5 Conclusion Many people believe that negative psychological experiences (which are not the same as adversity) can have extrinsic prudential value. Indeed, there is some reason to believe that negative psychological experiences offer artists certain kinds of insights. However, the interesting question is whether individuals are ever in the position to reasonably judge pro­ spectively that such experiences have sufficient extrinsic prudential value to make them worth choosing or enduring (when they could be avoided). I think that sometimes individuals clearly are in such a position and it can certainly make sense sometimes to choose lesser happiness for the sake of other goods. But we must be careful how we approach this topic. It is one thing to choose to forgo a highly positive perspective, and quite another to embrace a highly negative one. We need to ask whether the goods that come with negative experiences are sufficient to outweigh the bad. We need to make sure that there is not another, less negative path to the same goods. We need to be aware of the strong tendency towards hindsight bias in the narratives of people who have been through tough experiences. Most importantly, however, if we are to assess negative experiences properly, we need to be clear what kind of experiences we have in mind. Although mildly negative experiences may be worth enduring, especially if they seem to help a person produce things she values, it is much more doubtful that extremely negative experiences are worth it. Because we so often confuse the two, discussions of this topic remain superficial. But given that much of the debate in the realm of creativity is sparked by the high incidence of affective illness in this population, and given that affective illness typically leads to the more severe forms of negative experience—to suffering or extreme suffering—it is important to recognize the differences. Whatever extrinsic value milder negative experiences may have, it is unlikely that suffering in my defined sense has prudential value. On my view, choosing to endure such states for the sake of art makes no prudential sense even when we acknowledge the great prudential value of creative expression.

Notes 1 Some studies suggest links with other mental illnesses, including schizophrenia. For simplicity, however, I focus here on bipolar disorder and unipolar depression. Although some people continue to research potential links between schizophrenia and creativity, many theorists have concluded that the appearance of a link in the past was really just a reflection of the high rate at which people with bipolar disorder were misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. I do not offer a definition of creativity here, since I rely almost exclusively on studies of people who are already widely recognized as having artistic talent.

Artistic creativity and suffering  167 2 Although impressive, the research linking artistic creativity and mental illness has nonetheless been challenged in various ways. I do not explore those challenges here since I am interested in the hypothetical: what would it mean if, for a particular person, it were the case that negative affect were necessary for creativity? For critical discussions of this literature see Kieran (2014) and Gaut (2012). 3 I use “well-being” to refer to the special kind of value picked out by the locution “good for so-andso.” That which is good for a person is that which benefits her and is in her interests. That which is bad for her is harmful and against her interests. I also occasionally use “welfare” and “prudential value” as alternative ways of referring to the same kind of value. 4 For example, lithium, the most common treatment for bipolar illness can cause weight gain, dry mouth, and hand-tremors. See https://www.nimh.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a681039. html#side-effects. (Accessed July 1, 2016). SSRIs, the most common medications for depression, cause sexual dysfunction in 60% of patients (Beck & Alford 2009: p.273). 5 However, there is an important sense in which I do assume that no simple version of desiresatisfactionism is true. If it were, then if a person wanted to risk everything for the sake of her art, then doing so would by definition make her better off no matter how much she suffered in the process. I do not find this plausible, but I cannot say more in defense of this claim here. 6 See also Shapiro and Weisberg (1999). 7 One interesting study (Verhaeghen et al. 2005) investigated and found support for the idea that self-focused ruminative thought might lead to (1) negative affect and depression, on the one hand, and (2) enhanced creativity, on the other. On this model it should, in principle, be possible to separate the two effects of rumination.Thus, the authors of the study describe the implications of their work as, “the cliché that the artist must suffer is not true.” However, that is too strong. Even if the two are separable in theory, if we do not currently have good ways of separating them in practice, then for the foreseeable future they may still be bundled together for creative individuals. Even if the type of necessity at issue is not metaphysical or natural necessity, practical necessity is still important. 8 It is also important to note that more than one theory might be true, i.e. there might be more than one way that negative affect contributes to artistic production. For example, something like the bundle theory proposed by Verhaeghen et al. (2005) might be true, and it might also be true that artists carry away from their experiences insights that are valuable (a version of the special ingredient view). If that were the case, then even if it became possible to separate elements of the bundle, it might still be true that negative affective experiences have significant extrinsic value that would be lost with the use of medications to repress negative affect. 9 Although Jamison (1996) is certainly convinced of the positive value of negative affect, her own proffered explanations of the value mostly locate it in relation to the excesses of manic states. On her view, negative affect is valuable because it corrects for these excesses. So it is not clear from her account whether negative affect would have value for people with unipolar depression. 10 Jamison offers numerous examples including Roethke, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” Shelley, “Most wretched men/Are cradled into poetry by wrong/ They learn in suffering what they teach in song,” and Virginia Woolf who writes “It is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms…There is an edge to it which I feel is of great importance…One goes down into the well and nothing protects one from the assault of truth.” (Jamison 1996: 115, 118). The attitudes of artists towards their own negative experiences provide us with a reason for wanting to explore the relationship more. However, as I emphasize in the next section, their claims cannot simply be accepted at face value, since individuals may suffer from retrospective biases. 11 Although Jamison (1996) clearly believes in the value of emotional extremes, she is not very clear about the nature of that value. At times she suggests that artists gain important insights, but she doesn’t elaborate on what these insights might be or how they might contribute to art. I have tried in these two paragraphs to put forward a view of my own about how that might work. At other times, she emphasizes the value of shifts in mood, and still other times the wealth of cognitive material that might be available to the mind of someone who frequently inhabits different mood states (which seems to be the point about memory and mood congruence that I discuss next).

168  Jennifer Hawkins 12 Kramer (2000). Kramer’s piece is a response to Carl Elliot (2000), who argues that many negative ­affective states that seem like depression are really instances of alienation—an appropriate response to the modern world. 13 Although Kahneman uses the labels ‘System 1’ and ‘System 2,’ the terms originate with Stanovich and West (2000). My own thinking about and understanding of the dual process view has been shaped not only by Kahneman, but also by the essays in Hassin et al. (2005) and Evans and Frankish (2009). 14 Though this is not to deny the importance of System 2. Many affective phenomena are refined and given a more concrete formulation by System 2. For example, on my view, particular emotions begin as System 1 assessments, but often gain an additional layer of complexity from System 2. However, this is all compatible with my claim that personal perspectives are generated by System 1, and that personal perspectives are, for the most part, a System 1 phenomenon. 15 Although a positive perspective is intrinsically good, it is not the only good thing in a life, and therefore not in itself a guarantee of a good life overall. Consider the example of someone living in an experience machine who has a positive perspective. I maintain that it is typically worse to be in an experience machine than not, but if you are going to be in an experience machine you are better off with a positive perspective than with a negative one. This is what I mean when I say that a positive perspective is good in itself.

References Ackermann, R. and R. J. DeRubeis, 1991, Is depressive realism real?, Clinical Psychology Review 11: 565–585. Alloy, L. B. and L. Y. Abramson, 1979, Judgment of contingency in depressed and non-depressed college students: Sadder but wiser?, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 108: 4: 441–487. Andreasen, N. C., 1987, Creativity and mental illness: Prevalence rates in writers and their first degree relatives, American Journal of Psychiatry 144: 1288–1292. Beck, A. and B. Alford, 2009, Depression: Causes and Treatment 2nd edition, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dobson, K. and D. Pusch, 1995, A test of the depressive realism hypothesis in clinically depressed subjects, Cognitive Therapy and Research 19: 2: 170–194. Elliot, C., 2000, Pursued by happiness and beaten senseless: Prozac and the American dream, The Hastings Center Report 30: 2: 7–12. Evans, J. and K. Frankish, 2009, eds., In Two Minds: Dual Processes and Beyond, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaut, B., 2012, Creativity and rationality, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 70: 259–70. Haaga, D. and A. Beck, 1995, Perspectives on depressive realism: Implications for cognitive theory of depression, Behaviour Research and Therapy 33: 41–48. Hassin, R., J. Uleman, and J. Bargh, eds., 2006, The New Unconscious, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jamison, K. R., 1989, Mood disorders and patterns of creativity in British writers and artists, Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes 52: 125–34. Jamison, K. R., 1996, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, New York: Simon & Schuster.

Artistic creativity and suffering  169 Kahneman, D., 2012, Thinking Fast and Slow, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Kaufman, J. C. and J. Baer, 2002, I bask in dreams of suicide: Mental illness, poetry, and women, Review of General Psychology 6: 271–286. Kieran, M., 2014, Creativity, virtue and the challenges from natural talent, illbeing, and immorality, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 75: 203–30. Kramer, P., 2000, The valorization of sadness, The Hastings Center Report 30: 2: 13–18. Kramer, P., 2005, Against Depression, New York: Viking. Kyaga, S. et al., 2011, Creativity and mental disorder: Family study of 300,000 people with severe mental disorder, British Journal of Psychiatry 199: 373–9. Kyaga, S. et al., 2013, Mental illness, suicide and creativity: 40-year prospective total population study, Journal of Psychiatric Research 47: 83–90. Ludwig, A. M., 1994, Mental illness and creative activity in women writers, American Journal of Psychiatry 151: 1650–1656. Melville, H., 1996 [1852], Pierre or The Ambiguities, Introduction and notes by William C. Spengeman, New York: Penguin Books. Morris, W. N., 1999, “The Mood System,” In: D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwarz eds., Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 169–189. Peterson, C., 2006, A Primer in Positive Psychology, New York: Oxford University Press. Post, F., 1996, Verbal creativity, depression and alcoholism: An investigation of one hundred American and British writers, British Journal of Psychiatry 168: 545–55. Richards, R., 1981, Relationships between creativity and psychopathology: An evaluation and interpretation of the evidence, Genetic Psychology Monographs 103: 261–324. Richards, R., 1988, Creativity in manic-depressives, cyclothemes, their normal relatives, and control subjects, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 97:281–8. Schacter, D., 1996, Searching for Memory: the Brain, the Mind, and the Past, New York: Basic Books. Shapiro, P. J. and R. W. Weisberg, 1999, Creativity and bipolar diathesis: Common behavioral and cognitive components, Cognition and Emotion 13: 741–762. Stanovich, K. E. and R. F. West, 2000, Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23: 645–65. Verhaeghen, P. and R. Khan, and J. Joormann, 2005, Why we sing the blues: The relation between self-reflective rumination, mood, and creativity, Emotion 5: 2: 226–232.

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Part III CREATIVITY AND AGENCY

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11 Creativity and biology Margaret A. Boden

I Introduction Creativity is commonly thought of in exclusively psychological terms. The examples that are generally mentioned are drawn from arts, science, engineering, everyday conversation, humour, and so on. Sometimes, however, people also speak of biological evolution, and even life itself, as “creative”. The focus here is not on ideas, but on biological forms and/or mechanisms. This paper argues that creativity is indeed exemplified in biology. Both biological and psychological creativity are philosophically intriguing. The mysterious, near-paradoxical, nature of creative thinking is mirrored in living organisms. The question “How can a mind possibly produce something genuinely new?” gives way to “How can an organism possibly create itself?” Self-creation appears (theology perhaps excepted) to be an incoherent concept and a metaphysical absurdity. If something doesn’t yet exist, how can it possibly create itself? Even self-organization is puzzling: how can something organize itself? It seems that human minds, thanks to reflexive consciousness, do have some power to do that. But how could unthinking matter, or non-self-conscious organisms, do so? The puzzlement, here, concerns both conceptual coherence and actual mechanisms. In other words, the “how” in “How can …” means both “How can we even make sense of the notion?” and “How, in fact, can it happen?” In Sections II to IV, I show that my own definition of psychological creativity (which mentions both novelty and value) can be applied to biology. Section V adapts my account of three types of creative mechanism in psychology (described in Boden 2004) to examples drawn from biology. Section VI considers the seemingly paradoxical concept of self-organization, and Section VII shows how this concept can be rigorously applied in a number of biological contexts. Caveat: In its broadest sense, creativity can be defined as the ability to generate new forms, the nature of those forms being unspecified. In that sense, creativity is a topic also for chemistry (because atoms and molecules

174  Margaret A. Boden interact to produce new molecules), for astrophysics (because the naturally occurring terrestrial elements were formed in the stars), and for cosmology—not to forget theology. However, I shall consider only cases drawn from the life sciences.

II  Novelty and creativity When considering psychological cases, creativity can be defined as the abil­ ity to generate ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising, and valuable. “New”, here, has two meanings: new to the individual person concerned, and new—so far as is known—also to the whole of human history. Elsewhere, I have called these P-creativity and H-creativity: “P” for Psychological, “H” for Historical (Boden 2004). But P-creativity could also have been called I-creativity: “I” for Individual. I’ll use that label for it in this paper. Why change the label? The terms P-creativity and I-creativity are almost equivalent. Both refer to novelties found in individual examples, rather than a historical range. The difference is that P-creativity explicitly mentions psy­ chology, whereas I-creativity does not. So extending the notion of creativity to cover biology too, as I aim to do in this paper, is more straightforward if the category of novelty (e.g. biological or psychological) is left open. Some people focussing on psychological creativity might object to my term “I-creativity” (and to “P-creativity” also), on the grounds that creative thinking doesn’t depend only on individual psychology but is also strongly influenced by social factors (Csikszentmihalyi 1999). Indeed, one historian of science has said that the “great man” view of history might well be replaced by a “great opportunities” view, “with the emphasis on the socially given possibilities rather than on the people who exploit them” (Fleck 1982: 217). But social influences can play their role here only by affecting the psychology of individual minds. (Similarly, biological evolution depends on I-creative changes in individual organisms: see below.) In everyday discussions of human thought, H-creativity is usually the main focus. Writers agonize about how H-creativity happens, and even more passionately about who should get the historical credit. Certain types of people routinely miss out here. They include laboratory technicians (Schaffer 1994) and women—such as Rosalind Franklin (whose downplaying in James Watson’s book The Double Helix led Harvard University Press to refuse to publish it: Maddox 2002: 312). They have even included collaborative groups: Ivan Pavlov was nearly denied a Nobel Prize in 1903 because his Lectures on the Work of the Main Digestive Glands (1897/1902) declared that the discovery of conditioned reflexes was “the deed of the entire laboratory”—a declaration that troubled the Nobel Prize committee mightily (Todes 2001).

Creativity and biology  175 Much less ink has been spilled in respect of I-creative thinking. To be sure, those professional psychologists who stress the role of everyday mechanisms—such as perception, memory, and reminding—in creative thinking focus primarily on I-creative examples (Perkins 1981). And so do those who try to define/apply operational tests for creativity (Sternberg 1999). But highly relevant studies in developmental psychology are not widely recognized as pertaining to “creativity” at all. One pertinent example is Annette Karmiloff-Smith’s work on representa­ tional redescription (Karmiloff-Smith 1986, 1990; Clark and Karmiloff-Smith 1993). This shows how every child’s imaginative abilities are increased by a succession of spontaneous representational changes that describe alreadyheld knowledge in new ways. Children come to be able to think thoughts of a kind which they could not have thought before. And their creative powers gradually increase, as they develop the ability to vary their behaviour in more and more flexible ways—and even, eventually, to reflect on what they are doing. For instance, a four-year-old infant—already capable of drawing real houses fluently—who is asked to draw “a funny house”, or “a house that doesn’t exist”, may (with difficulty) draw a house whose windows have an unusual shape or size. He/she may even delete elements, so that the “funny” house has no door. But he/she will not draw a house with wings. An eight-year-old, by contrast, may do all these things. Comparable changes have been observed by Karmiloff-Smith not only in other “imaginative drawing” tasks (e.g. “funny men”, or “animals that don’t exist”), but also in very different domains—such as language, and the understanding of weight and physical balance. In short, it appears that children’s I-creativity in various domains develops gradually (although not necessarily simultaneously) as they grow older. This is due to spontaneous internal changes, not to the spurs of failure and reward presented by the outside world. How it’s possible for such spontaneous changes to occur is a special case of the puzzle of self-organization: see Sections VI–VII. I have described these developmental changes in terms of creativity (Boden 2004: 76–87), but they aren’t normally thought of in that way. The reason why they aren’t usually thought of as “creative” is that they are both universal and (broadly) predictable. In other words, what I’ve called I-creativity is usually ascribed to a thought that’s not merely happening in some individual mind (which, as remarked above, is always true), but which is also relatively idiosyncratic. The same bias—towards idiosyncrasy (and therefore unpredictability) as a mark of creativity—prevents people from seeing that the technique of Socratic dialogue is also a long-favoured way of eliciting I-creative thinking. The tutor, whether Socrates or one of his followers, knows full well what I-novel realization will occur in the

176  Margaret A. Boden student’s mind as a result of specific prompts in the dialogue. But because it’s so predictable, its creativity is unremarked. (The “bias” towards idiosyncrasy/unpredictability is matched by biases toward conscious self-reflection and autonomy, or freedom--Boden 2004: ch. 11; Boden 2014. In other words, even if creativity is not strictly defined in terms of such notions—as it is not, by me—they are commonly, and correctly, regarded as being characteristic of creative thought. We’ll see, below, that this can result in resistance to broadening the concept of creativity to biology.) Occasionally, an example of psychological I-creativity is considered important even though it’s known not to be a historical first. Alan Turing’s application for a Fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, is a case in point. In 1934, he submitted a dissertation that provided a refinement of a well-known theorem in statistics. The referee pointed out that this very refinement had recently been published by a distinguished Scandinavian mathematician. However, Turing could not have known about it, because it didn’t appear until around the time when his dissertation was submitted. The Fellowship committee were so impressed by the brilliance and originality of Turing’s proof that they gladly offered him the Fellowship. In effect, they were betting that this prime example of I-creativity (and of very-nearly H creativity) would be followed by others, equally important but fully H-original. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that they were right (see Section VII). But such examples are rare. When most people consider the arts and sciences, or even everyday banter, I-creativity attracts relatively little interest. In the context of biology, by contrast, I-creativity is universally recognized as being hugely intriguing. H-creativity in biology attracts significant attention too, of course. In phylogenesis, H-new species (and H-new physiological mechanisms) crop up from time to time, and evolutionary theory accounts for that. But ontogenesis and metamorphosis are perhaps even more puzzling. Ontogenesis, unlike the evolution of new species, doesn’t involve firsttime novelty. Every embryo was once a single cell. Similarly with life-cycle transformations: every butterfly was once a caterpillar, and every specieshopping parasite (such as a liver fluke) transforms its bodily form as it passes from one host-species to another. In all these cases, however, the novelty of each stage relative to its predecessor is evident—and astonishing. The creativity here is I-creativity, not H-creativity. But to deny its creative aspect would be wrong-headed. The “novelties” involved are familiar, to be sure: trillions of acorns have developed into oaks. They are even reliably predictable: embryologists can map the stages whereby an ovum turns into a blastula, and later develops a neural tube that eventually becomes a brain. No

Creativity and biology  177 idiosyncrasies there. (Strictly, that’s not true. Because development is ­epigenetic, i­ndividual differences will always arise. Some of these are just as idiosyncratic as Joe Bloggs’ passing thoughts: fingerprints, for instance.) But despite their familiarity and predictability, such I-creative phenomena remain compelling. How is it possible for yet another oak to be formed from a single, undifferentiated cell? We’ll return to that question in Section VII.

III  Identifying novelty Thus far, I’ve been writing as though the identification of something as new was unproblematic. In truth, however, it is not (Boden 2006: 1.iii.f-g). It’s often difficult to find the relevant facts. In locating psychological creativity, we want to know who said or did what, and when—and what ideas were already in their minds beforehand. The latter question can sometimes be partially answered by reference to a scientist’s diaries or laboratory notebooks, or to a writer’s library and commonplace books. These methods have been insightfully directed, for instance, to Charles Darwin’s ideas on evolution and to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry (Gruber 1974; Lowes 1927/1951). But such detailed access to the sources of the idea being investigated is unusual. Moreover, it’s almost entirely restricted to H-creativity. A Freudian psychoanalyst, to be sure, may try to figure out the sources of some idiosyncratic image in Joe Bloggs’ dream. And similar queries sometimes crop up in everyday gossip about one’s friends or public figures. In general, however, the relevant facts (concerning the individual’s background ideas) simply aren’t discoverable. In considering biological creativity, we want to know when and where a certain structure first occurred in phylogeny, or when a certain type of cell first differentiates in the embryo. These facts relate to H-creativity and I-creativity, respectively. In either case, a wide range of careful investigation—of the fossil record, and/or histology, and/or genetics—may be needed to find the answers. A deeper difficulty concerns just how to assess the “facts” in a particular case: just how to recognize or identify specific novelties. In attributing scientific creativity, for instance, how should we compare a novel but very general insight—or even a light-hearted joke—with a mathematically precise analysis and/or a careful experimental demonstration of the point in question? Consider, for example, the discovery of “bucky-balls” in chemistry. This involved the shocking idea that some carbon molecules may be hollow spheres. That would require that bonds between carbon atoms can form not just in one spatial dimension, as in a planar sheet of graphene, but in three.

178  Margaret A. Boden What’s generally regarded as the key paper appeared in 1985 (Kroto et al. 1985). It reported experimental research on carbon vapours heated to thousands of degrees, in which various multi-atom molecules (but mostly the soccer-ball C60, or Buckminster-fullerene) formed spontaneously. Subsequent research synthesized many new “fullerenes” of differing shapes and sizes. These included open-ended or closed tubes (formed when a few percent of nickel or cobalt atoms were added) that could act as molecule-carriers and electronic conductors, so providing for a host of novel technological applications. This pioneering work led to a Nobel Prize (Smalley 1996). It was rightly seen as “pioneering”, not least because of its unprecedented detail and systematicity (made possible by the team’s development of laser-instrumentation for measurement). Nevertheless, the central “shocking idea” had been suggested many years before (in 1970), by chemists in Japan and in the UK. But it was then considered too bizarre to be accepted by the scientific community. Moreover, a closely similar idea, envisaging the addition of impurities to a planar network of carbon atoms (and soon pointing out that the resultant hollow molecules might carry other molecules inside them), had been published in the New Scientist as early as 1966. But the author himself had presented this as scientific fantasy, rather than serious research ( Jones 1966; cf. Jones 1982: 118–119). Little wonder, then, that it wasn’t seen as a discovery, or even as an idea sufficiently intriguing to be followed up. The Nobel prize-winning team were aware of some of this earlier work. But they weren’t directly led by it to their own research. Moreover, they offered many new ideas, and radically new types of experimental evidence, in developing their theory. In short, even though the ideas of the 1960s and 1970s were precursors (not mere predecessors), they played no significant role in the creativity of the latter group. “Predecessor or precursor?” is an important question with respect to attributions of psychological H-creativity. A predecessor is a person who dis­ cussed the same topic as some later scholar/scientist, or who focused on the same aesthetically relevant issue as some later artist (death, perhaps, or blossom, or family feuds). A precursor is a predecessor who said/did significantly similar things about it. Clearly, identifying precursors and predecessors requires judgment about what to count as “the same” and “similar”. This is the other side of the coin from deciding just what to call “new”. If similarity is interpreted too broadly, thinkers may be cast in intellectual roles for which they’re not suited: mere predecessors may be seen as precursors. Moreover, as the bucky-balls example shows, a precursor may or may not deserve some of the credit for the later discovery. For, howsoever imaginative they may have been in their own time, they needn’t have influenced the later thinker: intellectual anticipation isn’t the same as intellectual ancestry.

Creativity and biology  179 As for examples drawn from art, how should we compare the “novelty” of full-blown Cubism with its first intimation in a very early, perhaps even tentative and incoherent, sketch by an experimenting Paul Cézanne? Or how should we assess Shakespeare’s creativity in writing Romeo and Juliet, for which he borrowed the plot from a story by Bandello? In art, as in science, to distinguish a predecessor from a precursor requires both comparison between the specific aspects of interest (plot-lines and poetic imagery, perhaps), and historical research into the actual influences concerned. The latter, in turn, requires more than asking whether the two individuals ever met, or ever read/saw one another’s work. Influence can pass indirectly from one mind to another, if the ideas have influenced some other thinker who has affected the person in question. So a Cubist painter could have been influenced by Cézanne indirectly, without ever having seen any of his canvasses. And Shakespeare could have heard about Bandello’s story, without ever reading it in detail. Analogous remarks apply to biology. Fish and mammals are similar in that they both require oxygen, but dissimilar in that they acquire that oxygen by using different anatomical structures: gills or lungs, respectively. Both those facts are biologically interesting, but in different ways. All biological structures are similar insofar as they are affected in some way by photons: should this be regarded as “proto-vision”? And should biologists regard a patch of transparent epidermis as a primitive lens? Perhaps that last decision rests on whether or not the patch gradually evolved into a real lens? “Similar” features found in different species may be linked through their evolutionary history, or they may have evolved independently. (Vision seems to have evolved independently in several different ways: Land 2001–2012.) Should we regard this diverse phylogenetic history as more “creative” than one in which vision—like the genetic code—evolved only once? In brief, novelty—whether H or I—is crucial to creativity in both psychology and biology. But identifying it is seldom straightforward.

IV Value Creativity is not mere novelty. A creative idea, for example, also has to be valuable. (This point is occasionally contested, by people writing about art or commercial innovation: Stokes 2011; Runco 2010. But most accounts of psychological creativity, my own included, take value to be an essential criterion—Paul and Kaufman 2014: 4. That’s closely linked with the fact that to call someone creative is not merely to describe them, but to express approval, or respect, for them.)

180  Margaret A. Boden There are many types of value (e.g. beauty, scientific interest, musical ­ armony, usefulness…). Value is assigned by judgments endorsed by socioculh tural groups: from experts to peers, academicians to the avant garde, and even including the fickle followers of fashionable celebrities. These values differ, and can change. So disputes about whether a certain idea is properly called “creative” may be based not only on disagreements about whether it satisfies this or that particular value (a question not always easily answered), but also on whether that aspect should indeed be regarded as valuable. It’s normally assumed that the originator of the creative idea recognizes it as being valuable. Sometimes, this isn’t so. (Johannes Kepler initially described his thoughts about non-circular—namely, oval—planetary orbits as “a cartload of dung”: Koestler 1975: 217.) But in general, the originator sees, or soon comes to see, that the novel idea is worth pursuing. Indeed, they very often devote further time to consciously developing and improving their new idea, with specific value-criteria in mind. These points about the role of value in creative thought do not transfer smoothly to biology. Certainly, we normally think of evolution as creating valuable H-new forms, and of morphogenesis as creating valuable I-new structures. That’s because we regard life itself as valuable, and also because we regard most living things as beautiful and/or exquisitely functional. But the sense in which the processes of natural selection and bodily development are “creative” is significantly different from that in which the thought processes of artists and scientists are. Biology in general doesn’t generate ideas or artefacts. (Beavers’ dams, bower-birds’ nests, and the twigs used as tools by New Caledonian crows are perhaps exceptions.) Nor does it involve conscious planning or valuedriven self-monitoring, as much—though not all—human creativity does. And there are at most only two values involved in the generation of novel structures: reproductive fitness and metabolic equilibrium. Others, such as beauty, are, of course, involved in humans’ appreciation of those structures. “At most”, because (despite the unthinking [sic] preference of peahens for magnificent peacock tails) it’s debatable whether recognizance of any value can properly be ascribed to organisms other than human beings—still less, to the unconscious biological processes of evolution and development in themselves. Nevertheless, biology’s novelties are often even more awesome than those produced by human minds. Biology’s ability to generate new (aspects of) living things includes evolution, morphogenesis, sexual and asexual reproduction, metabolism in general, and the autopoietic creation of individual cells: H-creativity when it first happened, I-creativity thereafter. (The origin of life itself lay outside biology, although it made biology possible.) To deny that biology is creative, because (arguably) non-human species don’t recognize values and/or because the conscious appreciation of

Creativity and biology  181 value plays no part in novelty-generating biological processes, would seem perverse. Granted, if my own definition of creativity is to be applied to biological cases, it must be understood that “valuable” here means valued by human beings, not considered to be valuable by the organism/process concerned. But that is not unreasonable. For even when ascribing creativity to people, we sometimes ignore the fact that the person had no inkling of the value of the novel idea. The case of Kepler (remarked above) is an example: we regard his earlier idea as creative, an oval orbit being a step on the way to his later, even better, notion of an ellipse. Those philosophers (cited above) who refuse to define even psychological creativity in terms of value would presumably be less averse to broadening the term so as to cover biology. For them, novelty is the key— and there’s plenty of that in living things, as we’ll now see.

V The three types of creativity The preceding Sections showed that the words “new” and “valuable”, when used in discussing psychological or biological creativity, have more than one meaning. Now, let’s consider “surprising”. The term “surprising”, here, has three meanings, each of which applies on two levels: phenomenological and procedural. At the phenomenological level, the “surprise” is our experience on encountering an instance of creativity (whether a novel idea or a novel biological structure). The three experientially different forms of surprise correspond—at the procedural level—to three sorts of mechanism for producing novelty. In short, there are three kinds of creativity, each with its characteristic phenomenology and generative mechanism. I call them combinational, exploratory, and transformational creativity. Before distinguishing them (below), it must be noted that these analytical distinctions are not mutually exclusive when ascribed to particular things. A single item may arouse more than one kind of phenomenological surprise. For instance, a painting may surprise us in virtue of both its stylistic transformation and its combination of images. Likewise at the procedural level: a single thing—perhaps a painting, or an embryo—may have been generated by all three types of psychological/biological process. So we shouldn’t ask “Is this thing creative, Yes or No?” Rather, we should ask which type of creative process has generated this or that specific aspect of the final form. The first sort of surprise is experienced when some unusual and unexpected combination of events happens. Very broadly speaking, it’s a phenomenological response to statistics, not to style or structure. (Or rather, not primarily to style or structure: statistically surprising combinations of styles may be highly appreciated: think of jazz in the style of J. S. Bach, for instance.)

182  Margaret A. Boden Examples in art include visual collage and much poetic imagery. For instance, the unlikely combination of knitting and sleep in Macbeth’s invocation: “Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care”. A drawing of a house with wings is also relatively unexpected: this instance of combinational creativity involves cross-category mixing (which is impossible for infants: see Section II). Scientific examples include William Harvey’s description of the heart as a pump, and the Rutherford-Bohr account of the atom as a solar system. (For discussion of the underlying psychological mechanisms, see Boden 2004: ch. 6.) Examples of statistical surprises in the biosphere include mutations in the genome. Both point mutation and crossover are mechanisms that result in novel combinations of genes. Sometimes, genetic recombinations lead to easily visible novelties, such as an unusually coloured rose. And sometimes, they generate highly idiosyncratic novelties: “genetic fingerprints”, for instance. The second sort of surprise, by contrast, is based in the exploration of some already-established structure. At the phenomenological level, it arises when something unexpected happens that is recognizable nevertheless as, in a sense, “more of the same”. That is, the novelty fits into some previously familiar structure: a new benzene-derivative, perhaps, or another Impressionist painting. Or, in the biological realm, yet another Dalmatian puppy. At the procedural level, instances of exploratory creativity are generated by the same structural constraints, or stylistic rules, that produced the earlier ones. Despite their novelty, they were already waiting in the wings. For they were part of the space of possibilities defined by the (conceptual or biological) procedural constraints concerned. Where psychological creativity is involved, the possibilities—and, sometimes, the limiting boundaries—of the space may even be explored (sic) consciously and deliberately by the artist/scientist involved. In biological creativity, that doesn’t happen. But the point mutations and crossovers that continually occur in the genome can be seen as leading to mini-explorations of the space of biological possibilities concerned. These are implicitly defined by the genome itself, together with the physics and chemistry that constrain gene-expression, copying, and mutation. (Biologists can now deliberately explore the potential of the genome by genetic engineering; this involves both psychological and biological creativity.) Although conscious exploration, in the hope of avoiding some particular difficulty, doesn’t happen in biology, what might be termed “genetic exploration” can occur in response to environmental difficulty (Burdon 1999: ch. 11.2). The genome may already contain certain genes that code for proteins that could be helpful in alleviating the environmental stress

Creativity and biology  183 concerned. These can be activated, or “switched on”, in conditions of temporary stress—such as a lack of a particular nutrient. (It is sometimes suggested that the genome may exploit its combinational creativity in response to environmental stress, by increasing the overall rate of mutation.) As for long-standing environmental stress (such as might follow on climate change, for example), there may be previously unactivated (seemingly “useless”) genes that can now contribute to reproductive success. That’s why genetic diversity, or variability, is biologically useful: it offers the potential (not necessarily realized) of a wider range of genetic exploration. The third sort of surprise, considered as a mode of experience, is deeper than the other two. It’s the amazement prompted when a new form (idea, artefact, organism) arises which seems to be not just new but impossible. It couldn’t have happened, we feel—and yet it did. This impossibilist surprise is our phenomenological response to novelties that are generated by transformational creativity. Here, one or more of the constraints of the possibility-space is/are itself altered, in a more or less fundamental way, so that structures that were strictly impossible before become possible—and, by hypothesis, instantiated. Psychological examples include non-Euclidean geometry (wherein an explicit axiom is deliberately dropped), Friedrich von Kekulé’s switch from string-molecules to ring-molecules in originating aromatic chemistry, and the prize-winning discovery of the fullerenes, described above. (For discussion of some relevant psychological mechanisms, see Boden 2004: chs. 3 and 4.) Familiar biological examples include cell-differentiation and organ-formation in developing embryos, and fundamental morphological changes (including metamorphosis) in a whole organism’s life-cycle. These types of ontogenetic creativity remain startling, despite their familiarity. As for phylogenetic creativity, this has H-created new species, genera, and families many, many times. Some of these are surprising not just with respect to their evolutionary ancestry, but also with respect to virtually all other living things. One such example is the astonishing gastric-brooding frog (Rheobactricus silus), whose females swallow their own fertilized eggs and allow them to develop into tadpoles and then young frogs inside the stomach, projectilevomiting them out when they have developed. These were first reported in the 1970s, in Queensland, Australia, but became extinct in the 1980s. However, they are now being cloned, in the hope of finding medical applications for the surprisingly non-destructive gastric juices. What of the procedural level? What underlying creative mechanisms could result in such phenomenologically arresting biological transformations? With respect to the phylogenetic (H-creative) examples, Charles Darwin outlined the answer in 1859. Today, his outline can be (partially) filled in

184  Margaret A. Boden with precise details of the genetic mutations and biochemistry involved. In other words, biological H-creativity—while still a marvel—is no longer a mystery. Biological I-creativity has been a tougher nut to crack. Another Charles-namely, Charles Babbage—suggested in the 1830s that caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis is caused by a change in “the laws of animal life” that was already provided for within the egg. The moth’s egg, he said, “involved within its contrivance, as a necessary consequence, the whole of the subsequent transformations of every individual of [its] race” (Babbage 1837/8). That wasn’t entirely hand-waving on Babbage’s part, for he reported that his Difference Engine could do essentially the same sort of thing. The Engine could be set up, he said, so that one rule of progression for generating numbers (for instance, successive squares, or the iterated addition of seven to the previous number) would be automatically replaced by another when a certain numerical value was exceeded. From the outside, this would appear to be a near-miraculous transformation in the Engine’s behaviour. But “the alterations are in fact only the necessary consequences of some far higher law”. And, he continued, “We can scarcely avoid remarking the analogy which they bear to several of the phenomena of nature “—metamorphosis and embryogenesis, for instance. However, a charge of hand-waving would be understandable. For Babbage was just as ignorant about the “laws of animal life” that are actually involved in biological transformations as Darwin was about genetics. It would take well over a century before they were first glimpsed, and even longer before they could be specified. The glimpsing, and the specification, required an understanding of the concept—and the phenomenon—of self-organization.

VI The concept of self-organization The general term that covers biological I-creativity is self-organization. But self-organization has been regarded as dangerous conceptual territory until relatively recently. For how can something possibly organize itself ? Some self-creative principle, or spirit, was said by the Naturphilosophien to imbue all living things. This concept inspired the Romantics in general—but it could hardly be regarded, even by them, as clear. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe tried to be less vague about what it might mean. His theory of “morphology” was intended to cover all forms, whether living or not—including inorganic crystals, landscape, language, and art. Here, we’re concerned with what he said about living things. The development of an individual plant, for example, was described in terms of lawful changes occurring through time as the plant grows

Creativity and biology  185 (Goethe 1790). Either sepals or petals, he said, would develop (from the same primal form) under the influence of different kinds of sap. And varying external circumstances could lead to distinct shapes, as of leaves developing in water or in air (an early intimation of “epigenesis”: see Section VII). As for phylogenesis (or, more strictly, ahistorical comparative biology), Goethe pointed out various structural homologies between different species. These were based, he said, on a limited number of primal forms. For instance, the archetypal vertebrate fore-limb could be transformed into the arms, legs, wings, and fins of different species; the archetypal vertebrate skull could transform into the skulls of long-nosed alligators or flat-faced monkeys; and all bones (he said) are transformations of archetypal vertebrae. Similarly, he saw the different parts of a flowering plant (stamens, sepals, and petals) as transformations of the basic form, the leaf. However, these notions were still relatively sketchy (and they couldn’t be clarified by appeal to empirical evidence: see Section VII). Despite being admired by the towering scientist Hermann von Helmholtz as offering “ideas of infinite fruitfulness” (Helmholtz 1853: 50), Goethe’s morphology wasn’t seriously followed up until very much later. Its “infinite fruitfulness” eventually germinated in the hugely intriguing writings of the biologist D’Arcy Thompson (1917), and began to ripen in Turing’s mind (see Section VII). Indeed, there are explicit historical links between the three thinkers (Boden 2013). Meanwhile, however, Goethe’s concept of self-organization was largely forgotten. Its eclipse wasn’t due only to its vagueness. It was due also to the fact that On the Origin of Species, published a few years after Helmholtz’s admiring remark, turned most biologists’ attention away from ontogenetic I-creation and towards phylogenetic H-creation. Some stayed faithful to ontogenesis, of course. And their theories were intelligible—at least up to a point. The biologists in the late-nineteenth century who tried to explain embryogenesis by positing a “life force”, or “vital entelechies”, weren’t flirting with nonsense qua self-contradiction. Nor were those in the early-twentieth, who spoke of unknown biochemical “organizers” directing embryonic development. (Neither was Babbage, in the passages cited in Section V.) They could be—they were—faulted for not being able to provide clarity and/or empirical evidence. But they were criticized for offering mystery, not paradox. Paradox threatened, however, when talk of “self-organization” became common among the early cyberneticians. Self-organization was not only not understood (not scientifically explained), but it was seemingly not under­ standable. The suspicion of paradox—or perhaps magic—was strengthened by the fact that the cyberneticians spoke about the origin of organization, not just its maintenance.

186  Margaret A. Boden The maintenance of order in living things is a tricky scientific ­problem, but not a philosophical one. (The system already exists, after all. Why should it not be able to maintain itself ?) By 1940, the scientific problem was already largely solved. How a living system manages to maintain various aspects of its structure had been broadly understood ever since Claude Bernard and Walter Cannon, in the 1860s and 1920s respectively, had described homeostasis. The self-regulation (sic) of blood-temperature, for instance, was no longer a physiological mystery. Magic had given way to metabolism. The origin of order, where none had existed before, was another matter. Some cyberneticians claimed to be able to explain that. Ross Ashby’s Homeostat machine, first demonstrated at the 1948 meeting of the Electroencephalographic Society, showed how randomness could give way to order (Ashby 1947). This remarkable electrochemical device could settle into an overall equilibrium state no matter what values were initially assigned to its 100 parameters (allowing almost 400,000 different starting-conditions). The Homeostat instantiated Ashby’s theory of dynamical adaptation (Ashby 1952). This was supposed to occur both inside the body (in homeostasis and, not least, the brain) and between the body and its external environment (in trial-and-error learning and adaptive behaviour). So Ashby’s theoretical reach was hugely ambitious. Nevertheless, even Ashby fought shy of the concept of self-­ organization. He did occasionally use the term, but he was distinctly wary of it. He saw it as potentially mystifying, implying that there’s an organizer when in fact there isn’t. So he issued a self-denying ordinance, complaining that the concept was “fundamentally confused and inconsistent” and “probably better allowed to die out” (Ashby 1962: 269). Believe it or not, that self-denying ordinance appeared in a paper called ‘Principles of the Self-Organizing System’, published in a volume with the title Principles of Self-Organization. Clearly, then, many of Ashby’s colleagues felt that the notion was too useful to drop. That view still holds. Despite Ashby’s qualms, the troubling term hasn’t been allowed to die out. Much as Cannon’s extensive physiological experiments showed homeostasis to be a thoroughly respectable concept, so recent theoretical and experimental work (see Section VII) has vindicated “self-organization” as an intelligible, and scientifically fruitful, idea. Today, it is defined in a way that avoids the seeming paradox of a nonexistent system organizing itself. For it is now understood as the spontaneous generation of order (or “form”) from a base that is ordered to a lesser degree. Here, “ordered to a lesser degree” includes both zero and minimal organization, as well as already-complex forms that are developing further. Moreover, “spontaneous” doesn’t mean magical, but following from the intrinsic nature of the system. The change is spontaneous, or autonomous,

Creativity and biology  187 in that it results from the system concerned (often in interaction with the environment), rather than being imposed on it by some external force or designer. In other words, the definition carries the meaning of self-organization without explicitly using the concept of “self ”. In self-organizing systems so defined, higher-level properties result from interactions between simpler ones—and there may be many different levels of organization involved. (Think, for example, of the successive stages of bodily organization in the developing embryo.) Self-organization in this sense, then, concerns not mere superficial change but fundamental structural development. In other words, it counts as transformational creativity.

VII  Understanding self-organization in biology The distinction between conceptual and scientific intelligibility is sometimes clear-cut. Babbage’s talk of changes in (unknown) “laws of nature”, for instance, was scientifically empty but conceptually coherent. At other times, it isn’t. Often, scientific advance goes hand-in-hand with—indeed, is needed for—conceptual clarification. That applies to the concept of self-organization. In this Section, we’ll see that scientific insights about how self-organization actually happens have helped to show that the notion is coherent. Considered by itself, Ashby’s Homeostat wasn’t enough to furnish a clear general notion of self-organization. Admittedly, it had provided a functioning model that illustrated the coherence of his theoretical ideas. And Ashby had claimed that essentially the same sort of self-organization occurs in living organisms—in particular, in the nervous system. However, he couldn’t provide biological/neurological chapter and verse. Moreover, the Homeostat could be said to develop “order where there was no order before” only in the sense that a randomly structured starting-point can be described as having no order. It said nothing about how a homogeneous origin (one can hardly say “a homogeneous structure”) can give rise to increasingly complex levels of organization, as happens in embryogenesis. That remained a mystery. The insights that enabled people to begin to understand how that is possible came from Turing, in his paper on ‘The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis’ (Turing 1952). That paper was the last of several exceptionally important H-creative ideas that Turing produced (so vindicating the appointment committee’s bet that he was worth a Fellowship). It was only a beginning, for he couldn’t give specific empirical details. Rather, his paper was an intoxicating mixture of challenging mathematics and appeal to very general principles of science. The general principles in question concerned chemical diffusion, and the molecular reactions and interactions that this makes possible. Turing’s

188  Margaret A. Boden “reaction–diffusion” theory showed that different chemicals, present in different concentrations and diffusing at different rates, will—in certain (quantitatively defined) circumstances—inevitably interact to produce, for example, spots, stripes, whorls, and 3D invaginations (e.g. gastrulation in the early embryo). As for applying the theory to specific organisms, he suggested that distinct bodily symmetries of the spiny little sea-creatures Radiolaria would arise if the morphogens were distributed on different axes within the cell. (A few days before Turing’s death, his PhD student Bernard Richards proved that this was correct: Richards 2005, 2013.) Turing’s account was a huge step forward in making the concept of self-organization intelligible. For the in-principle possibility of getting order from homogeneity in a chemical/biological system had been shown. But even he could offer no more than a tantalizing promise of scientific understanding, as opposed to conceptual coherence. In other words, he couldn’t give empirical details to back up his highly abstract discussion. On the one hand, he couldn’t instantiate his account of self-organization in a functioning machine, as Ashby had done. Or rather, he could do this only for very simple types of “order”, and only for order at one level: pattern from homogeneity, but not pattern from (pre-existing) pattern. (Think of the successive stages in the embryonic development of the neural tube, for example.) He was planning to use Manchester’s about-tobe-delivered Ferranti computer to do such modelling, when he died. On the other hand, Turing couldn’t say what the posited “morphogens” were—still less, how their interactions, at specific levels of concentration, would lead to this or that biological structure. He was just as ignorant of the relevant biochemistry as his embryologist contemporaries who spoke hand-wavingly about developmental “organizers”. For genuine intelligibility, advance would be needed on both those counts. Even if Turing hadn’t died, the Ferranti computer wouldn’t have done the trick. To model pattern-from-pattern transformation would require hugely more computational power, plus the invention of computer graphics. Not until four decades later could his ideas be explored systematically. Then, a computer graphics expert applied Turing’s own equations on several levels (i.e. pattern-from-pattern), generating images resembling—for instance— cheetah spots, leopard spots, and giraffe reticulations (Turk 1991). True intelligibility would also require empirical knowledge of the chemical substances and interactions actually involved. Today, some such knowledge exists. Three especially interesting examples concern the development of the palate in mammals, the growth of branching reef corals, and the life-cycle of an alga. In the first case, biologists have identified two biochemical substances acting as an activator-inhibitor pair in directing growth of the transverse ridges on the palate. Experiments involving the removal of a

Creativity and biology  189 ridge have shown that the spatial expression of these molecules, leading to new ridges, is “diagnostic of a Turing-type reaction-diffusion mechanism” (Economou et al. 2012). The second case is a computer model of the chemical interactions underlying morphogenesis that involves only one species-specific aspect (namely, the average size of a coral polyp). Otherwise, it is “entirely driven by a diffusion-limited process” such as Turing outlined (Kaandorp et al. 2005). The third example is even more striking (Goodwin 1994: 88–103; Jaeger and Monk 2013). It concerns a unicellular alga called Acetabularia. This organism, which can grow to a length of 2 centimetres, transforms its shape significantly throughout its life-cycle. At one stage, a shapeless blob. Then, an elongated stalk. Next, a flattened top. The flat top then develops a ring of knobs around the edge, sprouting into a whorl of laterals. Finally, the laterals consolidate to form an umbrella-shaped cap. The key to these morphological changes is the cell’s control of the concentration of calcium ions. Biological experiments have identified over thirty relevant parameters, concerning (for instance) the diffusion constant for calcium, the affinity between calcium and certain proteins, and the mechanical resistance of the elements of the cytoskeleton. Experimental evidence also suggests a number of complex, iterative, feedback loops, which both cause and respond to the continually changing values of the thirty parameters. These have been simulated in a computer model, which successfully generates various types of bodily morphology: stalks, flattened tips, and incipient whorls. (Only incipient whorls, i.e. a circle of alternating high/low concentrations of calcium at the tip of a stalk. That was due to limited computational power: the whole program would have to be executed on a lower level, for every lateral in the whorl. Umbrella-caps weren’t generated either. Possibly, these—unlike whorls—require parameter-values lying within a very limited range, and the team’s random variation of quantitative values didn’t happen to find them. Or perhaps umbrella-caps would require extra parameters, representing as-yet-unknown chemical interactions occurring in the real organism.) These three examples show that current developmental biology can (sometimes) put richly detailed empirical flesh onto the abstract bones of Turing’s outline of transformational I-creativity, a.k.a. morphogenesis. This may concern individual bodily features, such as palatal ridges, or entire organisms, such as Acetabularia. Moreover, work in neuroscience (and, independently, in computer science: Linsker 1986, 1988, 1990) has shown that spontaneous neural organization can occur in the embryonic brain as a result of random input (von der Malsburg 1973; Willshaw and von der Malsburg 1976; see Boden 2006: 1189–93). This may partially explain why newborn kittens already

190  Margaret A. Boden have organized columns of visual receptors. In other words, the columns don’t have to be specifically “coded” in the genes. Finally, “deep learning” in multi-layer networks involves the spontaneous (sic) development of hierarchical descriptions of initially chaotic input (Boden 2016: ch. 4). Such AI work may, eventually, help to explain just how representational redescription (Section II) can happen. In sum, self-organization is now a thoroughly respectable concept. Biological I-creativity is receiving proper attention, at last.

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Creativity and biology  191 Fleck, J. (1982), ‘Development and Establishment in Artificial Intelligence’, in N. Elias, H. Martins, and R. Whiteley (eds.), Scientific Establishments and Hierarchies, special issue of Sociology of the Sciences, 6: 169–217. Goethe, J. von (1790), An Attempt to Interpret the Metamorphosis of Plants (1790), and Tobler’s Ode to Nature (1782), trans. A. Arber, Chronica Botanica, 10/2 (Waltham, Mass.: Chronica Botanica, 1946): 63–126. Goodwin, B. C. (1994), How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson). A new Preface by the author added in 2nd edn, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Gruber, H. E. (1974), Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (London: Wildwood House). Helmholtz, H. von (1853), ‘On Goethe’s Scientific Researches’, trans. H. E. Eve, in H. Helmholtz, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, new edn (London: Longman, Green, 1884): 29–52. Jaeger, J., and Monk, N. (2013), ‘Keeping the Gene in its Place’, in D. Lambert, C. Chetland, and C. Millar (eds.), The Intuitive Way of Knowing: A Tribute to Brian Goodwin (Edinburgh: Floris Books), pp. 153–86. Jones, D. E. H. (1966), (as Daedalus) ‘Note in Ariadne column’, New Scientist, 32 (3 Nov.), 118–119. Jones, D. E. H. (1982), The Inventions of Daedalus (Oxford: W. H. Freeman). Kaandorp. J. A., Sloot, P. M. A., Merks, R. M. H., Bak, R. P. M., Vermeij, M. G. A., and Meier, C. (2005), ‘Morphogenesis of the Branching Reef Coral Madracis mirabilis’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 272/1559: 127–133. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1986), ‘From Meta-processes to Conscious Access: Evidence from Children’s Metalinguistic and Repair Data’, Cognition, 23: 93–147. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1990), ‘Constraints on Representational Change: Evidence from Children’s Drawing’, Cognition, 34: 57–83. Koestler, A. (1975), The Act of Creation (London: Picador). (First published 1964.) Kroto, H. W., Heath, J. R., O’Brien, S. C., Curl, R. F., and Smalley, R. E. (1985), ‘C60: Buckminsterfullerene’, Nature, 318(6042): 162–163. Land, M. (2001–2012), Animal Eyes, 1st and 2nd edns (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Linsker, R. (1986), ‘From Basic Network Principles to Neural Architecture (Series)’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 83: 7508–12, 8390–4, 8779–83. Linsker, R. (1988), ‘Self-Organization in a Perceptual Network’, Computer, 21: 105–17. Linsker, R. (1990), ‘Perceptual Neural Organization: Some Approaches Based on Network Models and Information Theory’, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 143: 257–81. Lowes, J. L. (1927/1951), The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (London: Constable). Maddox, B. (2002), Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (London: HarperCollins).

192  Margaret A. Boden Paul. E. S., and Kaufman, S. B. (2014), The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Perkins, D. N. (1981), The Mind’s Best Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Richards, B. (2005), ‘Turing, Richards and Morphogenesis’, Rutherford Journal, 1 (rutherfordjournal.org). Richards, B. (2013), ‘A Solution for the Morphogenical Equations for the Case of Spherical Symmetry’, in S. B. Cooper and J. van Leeuven (eds.), Alan Turing: His Work and Impact (Amsterdam: Elsevier), 818–826. Runco, M. A. (2010), ‘Parsimonious Creativity and its Measurement’, in E. Villalba (ed.), Measuring Creativity: Proceedings of European Council Meeting on Creativity and Innovation (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union), pp. 393–405. Schaffer, S. (1994), ‘Making Up Discovery’, in M. A. Boden (ed.), Dimensions of Creativity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press): 13–52. Smalley, R. E. (1996), ‘Discovering the Fullerenes’, Reviews of Modern Physics, 69(3): 722–730. (Nobel Prize acceptance speech.) Sternberg, R. J., ed. (1999), Handbook of Creativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Stokes, D. (2011), ‘Minimally Creative Thought’, Metaphilosophy, 42/5: 658–81. Thompson, D. W. (1917), On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Todes, D. P. (2001), Pavlov’s Physiological Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press). Turing, A. M. (1952), ‘The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, ser. B, 237: 37–72. Turk, G. (1991), ‘Generating Textures on Arbitrary Surfaces Using ReactionDiffusion’, Computer Graphics, 25: 289–98. Von der Malsburg, C. (1973), ‘Self-Organization of Orientation Sensitive Cells in the Striate Cortex’, Kybernetik, 14: 85–100. Willshaw, D. J., and von der Malsburg, C. (1976), ‘How Patterned Neural Connections Can Be Set Up by Self-Organization’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, ser. B, 194: 431–45.

12 Attributing creativity* Elliot Samuel Paul and Dustin Stokes

Among the questions that a theory of creativity should answer, ­importantly, are these. What conditions are conceptually necessary for something to be creative? Second, when one competently applies the concept CREATIVE, what precisely is one attributing to that thing, and what cognitive and perceptual features typify that attribution or judgement? The conceptual question is one for metaphysics, but a metaphysics informed by our cultural practices. The second pair of questions are broadly epistemological. We argue that a process condition is necessary for creativity: for anything to be creative, it must be produced in the right kind of way. This bears important consequences for creativity judgements. Even if the subject of one’s creativity judgement is specifically a product —say, a painting or sculpture—this judgement, if competent, will still involve attribution of the right kind of process. The second set of issues, then, is psychological. However, these issues are not analyzed (at least not centrally) empirically, since they are rooted in (i) what is conceptually or analytically necessary for something to be creative and (ii) what is involved in competently applying the concept CREATIVE. The simple argument schema that connects these two issues and our analyses thereof goes as follows: Let x = some idea or object. i x’s being F is conceptually necessary for x’s being creative. ii Insofar as a subject S is competently applying the concept CREATIVE: If S judges that x is creative, then S at least implicitly judges that x is F. Contrapositively, if S judges x is not F, then S judges that x is not creative. Premise i concerns what it is for x to be creative. Most generally, the question is just: what is creativity? We won’t pretend to answer the general question to any finality, but this conceptual issue is the subject of Section I. Premise ii concerns what is involved in competent judgements of creativity, with special emphasis on instances where subjects seem to be making judgements just of some product. The analysis given here follows from the results of the analysis of Premise i. We take up this issue in Section II.

194  Elliot Samuel Paul and Dustin Stokes

I  Creativity as a process concept Creativity is attributed to a variety of things. We call persons ‘creative’, most especially in the context of the arts. We also attribute creativity to the things such persons make—their products —talking of ideas or artefacts as themselves being creative. Finally, we talk of creativity in terms of processes, saying, for example, ‘that was creative’, where that is some set of actions and/or thoughts. This is true in the arts, in science, and in everyday contexts of problem solving. It is uncontroversial that one can reasonably describe all three types of things—persons, products, processes—as being creative. What is of interest here is how we should think about the nature of creativity judgements of products. We will argue that even when one is specifically judging a product to be creative—even when one is not explicitly thinking about the process—one is at least implicitly assuming something about the process by which it was made. I.1  Supplementing the “standard definition” Consider Premise i in the argument just above: x’s being F is conceptually necessary for x’s being creative. In the empirical psychological literature on creativity, there is something of a consensus that in order for a product, x, to be creative, it must satisfy two conditions: x must be novel and x must be valuable.1 Consider each condition in turn. First, it should be entirely intuitive that creative products are new in some way. An important question concerns exactly what this novelty amounts to. Here, an important distinction due to Margaret Boden applies (Boden 2004). Some x might be historically novel, that is, novel relative to the relevant history of ideas. But this should not exhaust theoretical interest in creativity, most certainly if part of that interest is in creative cognition and behaviour. Boden distinguishes historical novelty from psychological novelty. And so the product of one’s activities—say the solution to a puzzle—may be novel with respect to one’s own psychology or one’s own background of ideas even if it is entirely un-new relative to the broader history of ideas. Note that there is space in between: a product could be novel relative to some comparison classes (the history of one’s own ideas, the history of all ideas within a domain or a locale) but not others (the entire history of human thought, as observed by a God, say), and these differences in comparisons might imply interesting facts about the relative creativity of the product. But as Kant (2001 [1790]) observed, there can be original nonsense, and so there must be at least one additional condition on x’s being creative. The second condition that is widely agreed upon is that x is valuable. Sometimes researchers characterize this condition in terms of how x contributes to problem solving. Most simply, x is valuable relative to

Attributing creativity  195 some problem just in case x contributes in some non-negligible way to the solution of that problem. This problem-solving characterization of creative value is not the only one. Different researchers use different terms to specify this value condition, such as “useful,” “effective,” or “appropriate to the task at hand.” Other (non-exclusive) candidates include, being useful in some domain or discipline, affording pleasure to some recipients of the product (e.g. an artwork gives pleasure to its audience), simplifying or otherwise improving task performance or some other practical need. The problem-solving characterization is, however, instructive. It reveals how the psychologist’s definition is largely driven by experimental needs. If, for any given experimental task, the value condition is defined by explicit reference to solving a problem (or successfully performing a well-defined task), and novelty is defined by explicit reference to the subject’s past performance, then the definition provided is operational. And this will be true across a remarkably wide range of experimental conditions. For this reason, we take it, many psychologists take novelty and value (perhaps qualified in different ways) to be both necessary and sufficient for x’s being creative. The reader might pause to consider this suggestion. For any x, is it plausible that so long as x is novel and valuable, then x is thereby creative? We think that the answer to this question is ‘no’. What the standard, operational definition misses is any emphasis on the manner of production. It focuses on the product—how it is novel and valuable—but not on how that product is produced. Creativity involves creating, and so a definition should make this explicit. This is no less true when the subject of attribution is a product since, we suggest, a product will only be creative if it is the result or terminus of a process of the right kind. Indeed, we are not alone in this regard. Other theorists (most of them philosophers) grant that the novelty and value conditions are necessary, but deny that they are conjointly sufficient. The third condition that these theorists broadly agree on is what we will call the process requirement. Premise i above says: x’s being F is conceptually necessary for x’s being creative. A range of theorists agree that a third condition is this: F = being produced in the right kind of way. Putting this all together, then, at least three conditions are necessary of any product x to be creative: it must be (a) new, (b) valuable, and (c) produced in the right kind of way.2 Predictably, the agreement on some such process requirement dissipates rapidly upon attempt to further identify what “the right kind of process” amounts to. Here are a range of proposals. Our emphasis will ultimately be on the sixth of these, but the reader might take this emphasis as a placeholder of sorts. The first and second proposals are similar in spirit, and both come from psychologists. Amabile (1996: 35) argues that the right kind of process for

196  Elliot Samuel Paul and Dustin Stokes creative production must be (c1) heuristic rather than algorithmic, in the sense that it lacks “a clear and readily identifiable path to solution,” and it “might or might or not have a clearly identifiable goal.” Second, Campbell (1960, 1965) and Simonton (1999, 2009, 2012a, 2014) argue that the right kind of process is (c2) blind rather than sighted. The notion of ‘blind’ here roughly approximates the evolutionary notion of blind-variation. According to this theory (standardly referred to as ‘BVSR’ for Blind-Variation and Selective-Retention), the creative process must involve some random variation or manipulation of possibilities in a domain. This blindness admits of degree, ranging from random guesswork to heuristically guided search (see Simonton 2001). What unifies both type of theory is that the candidate for the right kind of process for creativity is neither linear nor rule-bound. Kronfeldner (2009; this volume) offers a third candidate that is similar in part. She also maintains that the right kind of process for creativity cannot follow a routine or mechanical procedure. Instead, it must be (c3) spontaneous, meaning that it must exhibit some degree of independence from intentional control and previously acquired knowledge. This is partly meant to capture the way in which creative products are unexpected for the agent: they somehow transcend the agent’s previous knowledge and intentions. In addition, Kronfeldner also argues for a fourth condition, namely that (c4) the process cannot simply be a matter of copying an existing product or imitating someone else’s method of production. A fifth proposal can be extracted from the rich work of Boden (2004; 2014; this volume). As already noted above, Boden distinguishes historical from psychological novelty. She also distinguishes different kinds of surprise that, in turn, typify different types of creativity. What’s crucial is that for some x to be creative, x must be (c5) produced in such a way that makes x surprising. There are then different ways, different processes, that engender surprise. Boden generally thinks of creativity in terms of conceptual (indeed, often computational) structure and the kinds of ideas that can be generated from within that structure, given its inherent constraints. From within a conceptual space, one might combine old ideas in new ways (combinational creativity) or identify new ideas or structures or limits of the constraints that inhere in the relevant conceptual space (explora­ tory creativity). Most radically, Boden suggests that we are most surprised when the constraints that inhere in a conceptual space are changed in some substantive way: a constraint is negated or a new one added. In this case, the subject goes through a process of genuinely transforming a conceptual space. As Boden is fond of putting this point, the subject here does something that is “downright impossible” or at least “impossible at first acquaintance” (Boden 2014: 228). This third type of surprise typifies

Attributing creativity  197 transformational creativity. Notice that, in spite of their differences, all three of Boden’s types of creativity, typed by a kind of surprise, make important appeal to distinctive processes. The sixth proposal (c6) is the one we favour, and will explore in more detail. This proposal combines various features of the proposals just discussed, while making one feature central: agency. Put most simply, the proposal says that the right kind of process for creative production is one that involves, in some non-trivial way, the agency of the creator. Gaut (2003; 2010; this volume) offers one articulation of such a proposal, as he maintains that the creative process involves “flair,” which is shorthand for a number of agential features. The agent must proceed with purpose (accidental processes will not result in creativity); she must possess and execute genuine understanding of the domain (by contrast to a rote or mechanical use of the information in that domain); she must execute judgement sensitive to the domain, for example if the application of rules or constraints is appropriate; and she must employ a capacity for evaluating the process as she undergoes it, knowing when to continue, change, or stop the process altogether. What’s crucial to note is how agency plays a non-trivial part in each of these four features of flair. A sparser but compatible proposal says that creativity always involves intentional action (where mental acts are included). Thus, some x is creative only if x is the non-accidental result of agency (Stokes 2011; 2014; see also Kieran 2014). Both versions of (c6) make agency essential to creative process. The right kind of process for creativity is one that extends from agency. A simple motivation for this way of characterizing the process requirement, and perhaps some of the others mentioned above, is that creativity is a praise concept. We praise individuals when they have been creative or produced creativity. And praise is not appropriately given to subjects who lack responsibility for their actions. In what follows, we will typically have (c6) in mind as the best candidate for the process requirement. And we will attempt to remain non-committal between the two versions mentioned: the right kind of process is one involving flair or is one that is the non-accidental result of agency (indeed the first might just be a fuller account of the second). As should already be clear, the operative terms here are ‘flair’ and ‘agency’, and both, when unpacked, are intended to characterize what, in addition to novelty and value, is needed for some x to be creative. Our non-commitment to details here is deliberate but not a hedge: it will turn out that commitment to some process requirement involving agency is sufficient to motivate the various epistemological implications that we aim to draw. Nonetheless, additional details will be further revealed as we work through, first, how one should think about processes in this theoretical context and, second, what kinds of arguments can be given for the process requirement on the concept of creativity.

198  Elliot Samuel Paul and Dustin Stokes I.2  On processes The process requirement enjoys some motivation just from consideration of the metaphysics of processes. Processes persist through time, and are sequenced in stages. They thus have both spatial and temporal parts. (Or, if one prefers, they may be differentiated or indexed both spatially and temporally.) Processes can be (partly) characterized in terms of different types of events. Accomplishments, as contrasted with activities, culminate in a terminus which justifies predication of the accomplishment term. We do not say that ‘S has baked a cake’ until the cake is baked. We may, however, predicate the corresponding activity term: we may say that ‘S is baking a cake’ at any point during the activity, even prior to the cake’s being finished. Accomplishments are, by contrast with activities, non-homogeneous: accomplishment terms do not appropriately apply to any sub-part of the whole event. Zeno Vendler offers the following example. If it is true that someone has been running for half an hour, then it must be true that he has been running for every period within that half-hour. But even if it is true that a runner has run a mile in four minutes, it cannot be true that he has run a mile in any period which is a real part of that time, although it remains true that he was running, or that he was engaged in running a mile during any substretch of those four minutes… Vendler 1957: 145–6 3

Running, then, is a homogeneous, non-culminating activity. To have run a mile, by contrast, is a non-homogeneous, culminating accomplishment; it is not until the mile mark is reached that the “climax casts its shadow backwards, giving a new color to all that went before” (Vendler 1957: 146).4 Processes are often understood as functional operations. This is, for example, how Alvin Goldman means ‘process’ in his famous account of epistemic reliabilism. Processes generate a “mapping from certain states— ‘inputs’—into other states—‘outputs’” (Goldman 1979/2000: 346). The reliable epistemic processes are just those that generate true beliefs at some requisite frequency. There is an important complication here for Goldman. Goldman thinks of processes as types, since only types have statistical properties. However, only tokens can be causes. The pinch is that he wants reliable process types, but the beliefs must be caused in a reliable way. His fix is to say that the inputs to the process and the intermediate events “through which” that input is carried (to output) are the cause of belief, and if that set of events causes a token of a process type that tends to result in true belief, that belief is epistemically justified. Since the present analysis of process need make no appeal to reliability or statistical frequency, it avoids this pinch. But its solution is instructive, since it

Attributing creativity  199 reveals that processes may be thought of as particulars or as types. When ­attributing creativity to a work or artist, we are interested in the particular processes that take a variety of inputs to some output.5 So processes process: taking input to output; they thus require a terminus. They are in this way well characterized by accomplishment terms. However, with respect to homogeneity, processes are naturally describable in both accomplishment and activity terms. Building a tree fort is a process. On the one hand, we cannot say of any part of the process that ‘S has built a tree fort’; we say this only at the time of accomplishment or output, when we have a tree fort. On the other hand, we can say of any part of the process that ‘S is building a tree fort.’ Prior to the output, S is engaged in the activity of tree fort building. In a process like tree fort building, the accomplishment is important to the activity. Planning structural details, gathering and binding materials, selecting tools, and so on, constitute building a tree fort only if a tree fort is the targeted (and actual) outcome. Otherwise, they are just an odd collection of activities. So processes, though illuminated by both activity and accomplishment categories, fall exclusively into neither category. Whether processes should be categorized as events—of either the accomplishment or activity type—is unclear. What is clear is that the features of processes identified in the above analysis comport well with our conceptual practices regarding creativity. They accordingly provide some motivation for the process requirement. When we think about and attribute creativity, there is typically some process identified (with greater or lesser clarity) that perdures across time, and consists of various stages. For any one stage, it is situated between previous stages and stages following. The process is constituted not just by these stages, but how they are organized. Thus, each stage contextualizes the others. A creative process proceeds towards a terminus, namely, creation of the product (be it an artwork or some other artefact, say a scientific theorem). The end “casts its shadow backwards” onto the generative process. By the same token, it is the process that enables the work, and the process that we appreciate when attributing creativity to that work. Or so this is what we will now argue, emphasizing how this process constitutively involves agency. I.3  Arguments for the process requirement Here are three arguments for a process requirement on creativity. Again, our emphasis is on (c6), where agency plays some constitutive role in the relevant process. But as the reader can determine for herself, some of these arguments might serve equally well for other versions of the process requirement. In this way, our emphasis on (c6) might be taken as a kind of placeholder, where the reader can substitute some other option

200  Elliot Samuel Paul and Dustin Stokes amongst (c1)–(c5) (or others) for that place, according to one’s interests and ­theoretical commitments. We should also note that none of these arguments is independently conclusive. But taken together, we conclude that there is a strong case for a process requirement. An argument from justificatory practice Consider our practices in contexts of appreciation of art. Pointing to one of Pollock’s action paintings, White Light, Maggie says to Phil, “That’s creative.” Eyebrow raised, Phil replies, “Really, how so?” Phil has now solicited a justification of Maggie’s attribution of creativity. In her response, Maggie might begin by invoking features of the work, mentioning the novelty of such features relative to the history of painting. It is much more likely, however, that Maggie’s justification will invoke features of Pollock’s generative process. She may describe how Pollock would drip, throw, and splash paint onto a giant canvass, spread on the floor so he could stand on it, dance across it, “be in it”; or his use of sticks, palette knives, and trowels to apply and manipulate paint. She might also suggest features of Pollock’s thought process: he is often quoted as desiring the work to serve as an expression of the artist’s gestures and techniques. He purported to go into a kind of trance when painting, obliviously leaving handprints, footprints, and cigarette butts in his wake. Or Maggie may mention the historical context, citing the obvious influences of, but departures from, cubism and surrealism. Although a rather heady answer to a simple question, it, or something relevantly like it, is the kind of answer one appropriately gives in justifying an attribution of creativity. The Pollock example is instructive in a number of ways (some of which we will not tease out until Section II below). As justificatory practices go, Maggie’s justification to Phil suggests that her reasons for judging White Light to be creative, and thus explicitly attributing ‘creative’ to that work, (partly) concern features of Pollock’s process of producing the work. In the example as described, Maggie invokes features of Pollock’s bodily and painterly technique, his goals and mental awareness, and a longer reaching causal connection to previous genres of visual artwork. She judges White Light creative because it was produced through this multifarious process. (And of course it should be noted here that this process, and its culminating accomplishment, enjoys both novelty and value. Our emphasis here, to be clear, is on the process condition rather than the novelty or value conditions.) There is nothing particularly special about this instance of justifying a creativity attribution. One would tell a similar story in justifying an attribution of creativity to all manner of artists and works: to Monet’s impressionist works, Duchamp’s readymades, Cummings’ use (or misuse) of grammar and punctuation in his poetry, Coltrane’s modal jazz

Attributing creativity  201 compositions, and so on. Likewise for scientific innovation and problem solving. Making sense of the creativity in these products involves understanding the generative processes from which they resulted. Generally, one appropriately justifies—provides reasons for—one’s judgement that x is creative, by invoking known or believed facts about the process that generated x. Note further how this example reveals the importance of agency as constitutive of the creative process. Put most sparsely, Pollock’s creative process involved a web of intentional actions. If Maggie’s justification accurately reports (to at least some degree) Pollock’s production of White Light, then that production is clearly the non-accidental result of Pollock’s agency. And one could go further and describe the situation in terms of Gaut’s notion of flair. Pollock proceeded with purpose (one explicit purpose was to express, through the painting, part of the very artistic process itself, as Pollock understood it). He clearly exhibited a genuine understanding of his domain, and executed judgements sensitive to his goals of abstract expression. And as anyone who has viewed photographs of Pollock at work could attest—his eyes squinting at the painting at his feet, brow furrowed, cigarette crooked carelessly from the corner of his mouth—he regularly employed his abilities of evaluation while painting. Thus, x’s being produced in the right kind of way—where the right kind of way constitutively involves agency—is necessary for x’s being creative. This conclusion could be put as one about concepts or ontology. Our concept of creativity is such that the process requirement constrains appropriate use of that concept; the second is a conceptually necessary condition for the first. Or (equivalently or not, depending upon one’s views about the relation between language/concepts and metaphysics), the conclusion could be put ontologically. Creativity is most fundamentally, or is most fundamentally a feature of, a process. Strictly speaking, there is no single object in space-time that is the locus of creativity (assuming processes are events, or at least something more like events than objects).6 We revisit this argument and its epistemological implications in Section II below. An argument from linguistic practice According to Vendler’s colourful description of accomplishment terms, the terminating product “casts its shadow backwards” onto the generative process. And indeed, it is most standardly through the accomplishment— the product—that we come to appreciate the process that generated it. This is as true for creative accomplishments as non-creative ones. However, when the product is one we judge to be creative, this judgement is made in a way that is sensitive to the process that generated the product. Accordingly, it is the process that we appreciate when attributing creativity

202  Elliot Samuel Paul and Dustin Stokes to that work. Here is an argument to this conclusion that appeals to our talk about creativity. Consider the following three sentences: 1 “ This sunset is creative.” You might execute a bit of charity but would, generally, take me to have spoken nonsense. Sunsets, like mountainscapes, the seaside, or a partially eclipsed moon, are beautiful or breath-taking, but not creative.7 Resisting attribution of creativity to these events is appropriate not because there is no causal process that terminates in the naturally occurring event, but because that process does not involve agency in any relevant way. This second case makes this observation perspicuous. 2 “Guernica is creative, but no one is responsible for it.” An utterer of (2) could rightly be charged with misunderstanding the concept of ‘creativity.’ Creative objects or events are things we praise. And we only praise artefacts that depend non-trivially on intentional agency. If Guernica were more like a sunset in this regard, then the second conjunct in (2) would be apt, but the first conjunct would not. And as a matter of actual fact, when we praise Guernica as creative, this attribution importantly depends on the responsible agent (Picasso) and his performance. This point is not special to artworks. The following is problematic for the same reason. 3 “Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is creative, but Einstein cannot be credited for it.” Barring suspicion of intellectual property theft, a statement like (3) is conceptually problematic. The first conjunct implies that the theory resulted from some process for which Einstein is, to some sufficient degree, responsible; it implies that Einstein is responsible for the theory. The second conjunct implies that Einstein, since he cannot be credited for the theory, is not responsible for the theory. Thus the first conjunct cannot, without contradiction, be conjoined with the second. We draw no strong metaphysical conclusion from these linguistic tests. However, these cases do provide additional motivation for the process requirement. At least as far as it goes, linguistic practice suggests a constraint on proper attribution of ‘creative’. We do not properly make these attributions in cases where there is no identifiable process that involves or depends non-trivially on the intentional actions of an agent. This provides some further reason to think that x’s being produced in a way constitutively involving agency is conceptually necessary for x’s being creative.

Attributing creativity  203 A modal argument The arguments from justificatory practice and linguistic practice both appeal to features of our practices of appreciation in the actual world: what people would typically say to justify a creativity judgement, and how people ordinarily speak about creativity. Here is a brief attempt to motivate a broader reaching conclusion about a process requirement. Imagine a possible world very much like our own. In this world, there are non-biological objects of beauty, tools and devices that simplify life, and agreed upon methods that optimize task-performance. So, in one sense, inhabitants of this world enjoy analogues to our artworks, scientific technologies, and problem solutions. Here is the twist: in this world, all such objects spontaneously appear, all-at-once and in an instant, as and when needed. The world is, in an important sense, preformatted with the kind of optimization and enhancement that took thousands of years to evolve in the actual world. These analogues to our artworks and technologies can still be appreciated for various kinds of aesthetic value and practical utility, but they are not identified by the inhabitants of this world as resulting from any kind of process. They are just part of the way people find the world, as it were. Call this no-process world, Wnp. Consider a second possible world. This world is just like Wnp, except that any time the analogues to our artworks, technologies, and problem solutions occur, they do occur by virtue of some generative process. So this world isn’t preformatted for optimization as Wnp is: artworks and technologies must be produced as and when they are relevant or needed. But what distinguishes this world from the actual world is that the processes that generate these analogues do not involve or depend on agency in any way. So production of the analogues to our artworks, tools, and technologies for making life more efficient or safe, is all done automatically, and without intention. By contrast to Wnp, this world comes with inhabitants that are preformatted, or hardwired, for optimization. What we produce by labour and failure and deliberation, they produce by their very instinctive natures. They produce as easily as we breathe. Call this no-agential process world Wnap. As is often the case with these kinds of modal thought experiments, it is a challenging task to fill out the details of the possible worlds in ways that are consistent and coherent. But the cautious lesson we want to draw— insofar as both Wnp and Wnap are consistently and coherently imaginable— is that both worlds would be devoid of creativity. Both worlds would be rather similar to ours in terms of the objects used, the bodily behaviours performed (though this would differ dramatically between Wnp and Wnap), and how the value and utility of such things are appreciated. But neither world would enjoy a shred of creativity. The stepwise presentational move from Wnp to Wnap makes clear what is important. Wnp is in some sense less

204  Elliot Samuel Paul and Dustin Stokes rich than Wnap since only the latter involves some production process that results in the products that are analogous to our artworks, technologies, and innovations. But Wnap nonetheless fails to instantiate any creativity by virtue of the fact that the inhabitants of that world, and the producers of the relevant products, behave entirely instinctively (without intention) when producing. There is no intentional agency determinative of the process that results in the relevant products. Consequently, just like Wnp, there is no creativity in Wnap. The general (but still cautious lesson) is that the process requirement is no mere contingent matter. There is no possible world that lacks processes of production, partly constituted by intentional agency, which also involves creativity. Again, this can be put as a conceptual or ontological claim. Whatever other concepts we might properly apply, our concept of creativity simply doesn’t apply to the relevant analogues in Wnp or Wnap. Being produced in the right kind of way—minimally, non-trivially depending on intentional agency—is conceptually necessary for some x to be creative. Ontologically, creativity is fundamentally (or fundamentally a feature of) a process, and that process must involve in some deep way, agency. Possible worlds that lack agents capable of intentionally undergoing processes of the right kind are worlds where no creativity occurs. Brief summary The most general suggestion made in this section is that the definition of creativity standard in the psychological literature must be supplemented. In the simple argument offered at the start of our discussion, Premise i says: x’s being F is conceptually necessary for x’s being creative. The standard definition says that novelty and value both hold the place of F (this premise is effectively a schema to be filled out as many times as is needed to suffice for a complete definition of creativity). We, like a number of theorists, have suggested that novelty and value are insufficient; there is an additional process requirement on creativity. The x’s being produced in the right kind of way is conceptually necessary for x’s being creative. The right kind of way, we have argued, non-trivially involves intentional agency. Processes that result in creativity must constitutively involve intentional agency. This has been put as a conceptual claim, but it might also (perhaps equivalently) be put as an ontological claim (about what creativity is).

II Epistemology The psychological question of central interest is what is involved in, or what is the structure of, competent judgements about creativity. Section I was spent motivating a conceptual process requirement for the concept

Attributing creativity  205 CREATIVITY. Although we take our arguments to this conclusion to be novel, the conclusion itself is not. Others have argued for a process requirement of some kind. And so it will be no surprise, at least to those theorists, that creativity judgements often involve judgement that an agent has undergone a process of the right kind (where theorists can fill out ‘of the right kind’ as their theories dictate). However, there are two ways in which the analysis just given has significant implications (the second one perhaps most surprising, and accordingly the central subject matter for this concluding section). First, it is worth noting that one can, and some do, defend a pure product view of creativity. As an intuitive matter, art appreciators spend more time at galleries enjoying creative artworks than they do on the art-history of creative processes of artists. We talk about creative breakthroughs and theories in science, perhaps more than the research activities that generate them. These intuitions comport with a formidable view in analytic aesthetics, namely, the anti-intentionalism defended foremost by Monroe Beardsley. Although more standardly taken as a theory about aesthetic value, Beardsley extends his anti-intentionalism to creativity as well. He writes, “The true locus of creativity is not the genetic process prior to the work but the work itself as it lives in the experience of the beholder” (Beardsley 1965: 302). Beardsley’s view is motivated by an independent anti-intentionalist argument. That argument has been recounted and criticized elsewhere (Stokes 2008). What our analysis provides is an independent set of arguments that push against the pure product view. At least sometimes, the “locus” of creativity is the very “genetic process” that Beardsley denies. The second and perhaps more surprising implication of our process view is this: even when one is judging a product to be creative (for instance, one is pointing to and saying of an artwork or a bit of technology that that is creative), one is at least implicitly identifying the agency-involving process that generated that product. This conclusion will require more work to motivate. To begin, recall the simple argument schema with which we began our discussion. Let x = some idea or object. i x’s being F is conceptually necessary for x’s being creative. ii Insofar as a subject S is competently applying the concept CREATIVE: If S judges that x is creative, then S at least implicitly judges that x is F. Section I was spent motivating the claim that novelty and value do not suffice. A third condition needed is broadly this: F = being produced in the right kind of way. And being produced in the right kind of way, we argued, is a generative process that non-trivially involves agency. Gaut’s notion

206  Elliot Samuel Paul and Dustin Stokes of flair nicely captures the way in which a process might ­non-trivially involve agency. If Premise ii follows from Premise i, then we can infer the following. Insofar as a subject S is competently applying the concept CREATIVE: If S judges x is creative, then S at least implicitly judges that x was produced in the right kind of way, as the result of a generative process that non-trivially involves agency. This is a conclusion about the implicit structure, or implicit content, of a subject’s creativity judgement. And what’s crucial to note is that it follows no less if x is a product: an artwork, a theory, a piece of technology, and so on. Any such judgement, if made properly or accurately, implies a commitment to the product’s resulting from a process partly constituted by intentional agency. Put perhaps too crudely, judging a product creative is to judge a process creative. Revisiting some of the considerations and arguments from Section I will further motivate this psychological claim. Consider the argument from justificatory practices. Maggie judged of a product, White Light, that it is creative. This judgement was queried for justification. Maggie’s justification to Phil betrays the nature of the knowledge required for identifying creativity as such. Maggie’s attribution of creativity—as a verbal report of her judgement—was to an object. But in justifying that attribution, Maggie invoked features of Pollock’s creative process: his physical actions, tools and techniques used, habits, intentions, desires, and so on. The process requirement implies that this was necessary for competent use of the concept CREATIVITY. Without this contextual knowledge, Maggie could not properly judge, could not identify, the creativity of White Light. To be sure, this is not to imply that to judge creativity is to know or understand processes as such. One needn’t be a metaphysician to competently use the concept of creativity. Nonetheless, the background knowledge needed will accord with the features of processes as described above. Although one may not organize and situate all the components of an identified process, one identifies (in identifying a process) some of the components and their relations. This is what Maggie has done. In her justification, she has not in any robust way, organized the invoked features of Pollock’s creative process. But each of those features are components: spatio-temporal parts that make up the stages or web of Pollock’s creative activity, and proceed towards the terminus, White Light. So, even if Maggie’s initial creativity judgement—her conscious thought—explicitly concerned a product, she was nonetheless implicitly drawing upon background assumptions about a process. This follows from the conceptual process requirement on CREATIVITY, and it surfaces in circumstances where one is explicitly challenged to provide reasons for one’s creativity judgement. Put in an ontological mode, creativity is (or is partly constituted by) a process. Therefore, any accurate judgement that x is creative

Attributing creativity  207 at least partly involves attribution of a process. And, we have argued, the right kind of process is one that constitutively involves agency. This has further implications for how we talk about, perceive, and ultimately know creativity. As noted several times now, we often talk of products as being creative. We employ an attribution of the form: 4 o is creative. If our analysis is correct, and there is a process requirement on the concept of creativity, then (4) is elliptical for an attribution of the form: 5 o was the result of some creative process p. The surface grammar of (4) is thus superficial and potentially misleading. What one means when uttering (4), if one is using the term correctly, is something very much like (5). And moreover, the right kind of process will be one involving agency in a non-trivial way. Put in Gaut’s terms of flair, an utterance of the form (4) packs in a great deal of information about an agent’s acting purposefully, with understanding, executing judgement and making evaluations, ultimately culminating in the product, o.

Conclusion We’ve noted that three kinds of things may be creative: persons, processes, and products. The standard definition of creativity, used nearly by consensus in psychological research, focuses specifically on products and says that a product is creative if and only if it is new and valuable. We’ve argued that at least one further condition is necessary for a product to be creative: it must have been produced by the right kind of process. We’ve argued furthermore that this point has an interesting epistemological implication: when you judge a product to be creative—when you attribute creativity—you are not just judging it to be new and valuable. Even if you did not witness how it was produced, you are also making a judgement about how it was produced.

Acknowledgements We are grateful to the editors for helpful comments and encouragement on an earlier draft.

Notes * This work was thoroughly collaborative and the paper thoroughly co-authored. 1 Variations on the standard two-part definition can be found, for example, in Kaufman and Gregoire (2015), Stein (1953), and Sternberg and Lubart (1999). Klausen (2010) offers a careful refinement of it without suggesting further conditions.

208  Elliot Samuel Paul and Dustin Stokes 2 Notice, then, that we make no commitment on the joint sufficiency of novelty, value, and the process requirement. And there are other additional candidate conditions in the literature (Boden 2004; Nanay 2014; Novitz 1999; Simonton 2012b; Stokes 2011). Here, we will only argue that novelty and value are insufficient, and that the third process condition is necessary. 3 See also Ryle (1949) and Casati and Varzi (2006). For extended discussion of a metaphysics of creative process, see Stokes (2008). 4 More carefully, ‘running’ is a term for a homogeneous, non-culminating activity; ‘to run a mile’ is a term for a non-homogeneous, culminating accomplishment. The former activity term does not appropriately apply to the latter accomplishment; the latter accomplishment term does not appropriately apply to the former activity. 5 This is perhaps worthy of further emphasis: the commitment to creative process qua particular implies no commitment to a claim that there is a single or unified type of creative process. 6 See Stokes (2008) for a defense of a variant of this view. 7 Though some claim otherwise. See Arnheim (2001), who asserts that the arrangement of a tree’s branches is creative.

References Amabile, T. (1996) Creativity in Context, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Arnheim, R. (2001) “What it Means to be Creative,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 41 (1), 24–25. Beardsley, M. (1965) “On the Creation of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 23, 291–304. Boden, M. (2004) The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2nd ed., London: Routledge. Boden, M. (2014) “Artificial Intelligence and Creativity: A Contradiction in Terms?,” In E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, Clarendon: Oxford University Press. 224–44. Campbell, D. (1960) “Blind Variation and Selective Retention in Creative Thought as in Other Knowledge Processes,” Psychological Review, 67, 380–400. Campbell, D. (1965) “Variation and Selective Retention in Socio-Cultural Evolution,” In H. R. Barringer, G. I. Blanksten, and R. W. Mack (eds.), Social Change in Developing Areas: A Reinterpretation of Evolutionary Theory, Cambridge: Schenkman. 19–49. Casati, R. and Varzi, A. (2006) “Events,” In E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2006 Edition), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/sum2006/entries/events/. Gaut, B. (2003) “Creativity and Imagination,” In B. Gaut and P. Livingston (eds.), The Creation of Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 148–73. Gaut, B. (2010) “The Philosophy of Creativity,” Philosophy Compass, 5 (12), 1034–1046. Goldman, Alvin (1979) “What is Justified Belief ?,” In G. S. Pappas (ed.), Justification and Knowledge, Dordrecht: Reidel; repr. in E. Sosa and J. Kim (eds.) (2000), Epistemology: An Anthology, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. 340–53. Kant, I. (2001 [1790]) Critique of Judgment, W.S. Pluhar (trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

Attributing creativity  209 Kaufman S. B. and C. Gregoire. (2015) Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, New York: Perigee. Kieran, M. (2014) “Creativity as a Virtue of Character,” In E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), Philosophy of Creativity, New York: Oxford University Press. Klausen, S. H. (2010) “The Notion of Creativity Revisited: A Philosophical Perspective on Creativity Research,” Creativity Research Journal, 22, 347–60. Kronfeldner, M. E. (2009) “Creativity Naturalized,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 59, 577–92. Nanay, B. (2014) “An Experiential Account of Creativity,” In E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), Philosophy of Creativity, New York: Oxford University Press. Novitz, D. (1999) “Creativity and Constraint,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 77, 67–82. Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson. Simonton, D. K. (1999) Origins of Genius, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simonton, D. K. (2001) “Creativity as Cognitive Selection: The Blind-Variation and Selective-Retention Model,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 554–6. Simonton, D. K. (2009) “Creativity as a Darwinian Phenomenon: The BlindVariation and Selective-Retention Model,” In K. Bardsley, D. Dutton, and M. Krausz (eds.), The Idea of Creativity, Boston, MA: Brill. Simonton, D. K. (2012a) “Creative Thought as Blind Variation and Selective Retention: Why Creativity Is Inversely Related to Sightedness,” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 33 (4), 253. Simonton, D. K. (2012b) “Taking the US Patent Office Criteria Seriously: A Quantitative Three-Criterion Creativity Definition and its Implications,” Creativity Research Journal, 24 (2–3), 97–106. Simonton, D. K. (2014) “Hierarchies of Creative Domains: Disciplinary Constraints on Blind-Variation and Selective-Retention,” In E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), Philosophy of Creativity. New York: Oxford University Press. Stein, M. I. (1953) “Creativity and Culture,” The Journal of Psychology, 36, 311–22. Sternberg, R. J. and T. I. Lubart (1999) “The Concept of Creativity: Prospects and Paradigms,” In R. J. Sternberg (ed.), Handbook of Creativity, Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 3–15. Stokes, D. (2008) “A Metaphysics of Creativity,” In K. Stock and K. ThomsonJones (eds.), New Waves in Aesthetics, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. 105–24. Stokes, D. (2011) “Minimally Creative Thought,” Metaphilosophy, 42, 658–81. Stokes, D. (2014) “The Role of Imagination in Creativity,” In E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, Clarendon: Oxford University Press. 157–84. Vendler, Z. (1957) “Verbs and Tenses,” The Philosophical Review, 66, 143–60.

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Part IV EXPLAINING CREATIVITY

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13 Explaining creativity Maria Kronfeldner

Introduction There is a long tradition in the history of philosophy, art or science that regards creativity as extraordinary and in that sense exceptional. Looked at closely, the exceptionalist attitude comes in two varieties: creativity as realized by exceptional people or by exceptional cognitive processes. It is often combined with a second attitude, namely that creativity is a mystery that cannot be explained. It is inexplicable from a naturalistic point of view. Because of the latter, creativity is often regarded as the ‘last frontier’ of a science of the mind. Consequently, computers are denied the potential to be creative; computers might exhibit cognition, but they are not creative, or so the argument goes. The first attitude assumes (what I call) an excep­ tionalist concept of creativity and the second (what I call) an obscurantist concept of creativity. These two attitudes towards creativity are distinct but historically connected. In this paper, I will directly criticize only the obscurantist concept of creativity. The results, however, shall cast doubt on the exceptionalist concept too. I will defend two claims to demystify creativity: (1) the claim that creativity cannot be explained at all wrongly identifies creativity with what I shall call metaphysical freedom (i.e., libertarian freedom presupposing the falsity of determinism); (2) the Darwinian approach to creativity, a prominent naturalistic account of creativity, fails to give an explanation of creativity because it confuses description (and the concept of creativity which rests on it) with giving an explanation of the respective phenomenon. I will close with some remarks about the philosophical status of and differences in explanations available in contemporary cognitive science.1

Originality and spontaneity as the core aspects of creativity The phenomenon of creativity is characterized by originality and spontaneity. Originality points to the conceptual assumption that creativity requires that something new is produced. As I argued elsewhere (Kronfeldner 2009, 2011), the kind of novelty that is required – in what is usually meant by

214  Maria Kronfeldner the term ‘creativity’ – is of a specific kind, neither anthropological nor historical. If you just create a new bit of culture – something humans qua humans (and some animals) do all the time – then you create something new in an anthropological and numerical sense, but you are not creative in the narrow sense of the term. For instance, if you create a new token pot of the kind typical of the culture you participate in, then you are not creative, since you learned to make it the way you do it. You follow a routine. Learning and following a routine is usually conceptually contrasted with creativity.2 Not all making or fabricating, as Gaut (this volume) calls it, is creative in the narrow sense. The same conceptual contrast helps explicating why you can be creative even if you are historically not the first one doing what you are doing. Historical novelty, as Boden (2004: 43–48) stressed, is not required for creativity in the narrow sense targeted here. What is most interesting from my point of view, as stressed in Kronfeldner (2009), is however not the distinction as such (between historical novelty and what is now called, following Boden, ‘psychological novelty’), but the reason why historical novelty is not important for explaining creativity in the narrow sense, even though it is historical novelty that fills the annals of hero-worshipping in science, philosophy or art and creativity ‘in the wild’, as some might say. The reason lies in the asymmetry involved, which shows that psychological novelty is more fundamental. The asymmetry is the following: even though every historical novelty must have been a psychological novelty (it entails it, as Gaut in this volume writes), the converse does not hold, since an insight can be psychologically new without being historically new. The asymmetry arises from connecting – and that is the crucial point behind the asymmetry – the novelty criterion back to causal processes and thus to relations; historical novelty points to the existence of an original, but it is not the existence of an original that is important for the question of whether an act of production exhibits originality at the psychological level. What is important for that question is rather the kind of process connecting what already exists to what one produces; whether there is a causal connection between the alleged ‘original’ and the alleged ‘copy.’ Creativity is compromised only if you copied the original (in whatever sense, via social or individual learning, etc.), i.e., if there is a causal link between the original and what you make. Certainly, in order to have one’s own creativity compromised by an original, there needs to be a historical original, but the fact that there is an original is not sufficient to be compromising. Originality is pointing to a relation, independence of an individual from the rest of the world, and not to occurrences of novelty (as an intrinsic property of the products of creative minds).3 Spontaneity points to the phenomenological datum that the individual, if creative, has no control over the creative process. Terms like ‘insight,’

Explaining creativity  215 ‘inspiration,’ ‘surprise,’ and ‘eureka!’ point to this aspect. You can raise your arm by the power of your will, but you cannot come up with an idea for a problem that demands a creative solution simply by the command of your will. If you invented your own technique of how to make pots and you make a (numerically) new pot using this technique, you are not performing a creative act in the narrow sense assumed here, since you simply follow a routine, even if it is your very own routine. At that moment, you might be original, but not creative in the narrow sense. There is abundant evidence – from the annals of history as well as from experimental studies of psychologists – that creativity in the narrow sense involves a kind of spontaneity (what psychologists call instantaneous insight) that amounts to a loss of control over the process of creativity. Insight or spontaneity, whichever term we prefer, can thus count as a phenomenological datum of creativity research, part of what it is like to be creative. It is thus part of the description of creativity. Consequently, spontaneity has been used as a second conceptual criterion for creativity in the narrow sense. After all, an adequate concept of creativity certainly depends on how we describe the occurrences thereof. Yet, that creativity is characterized by spontaneity does not mean that there is no goal-directedness involved. Even though creativity can happen without any goal (i.e., a problem to solve in mind), as in cases of so-called true serendipity, there are also cases of so-called pseudo-­ serendipity and cases of true creative trial-and-error problem-solving. In cases of true serendipity, one is not looking for a solution to a problem. One only recognizes something as a solution to a problem, i.e., one takes something to be a problem to be solved at the moment one sees the solution to it. In cases of pseudo-serendipity, there is a perceived problem, but there is no active search for a solution, e.g., by producing trials. One does not produce a trial in pseudo-serendipity; one simply comes across a solution while looking for it. Only in cases of trial-and-error are you intentionally producing trials, even though this goal-orientedness is not sufficient for finding the solution, since there are cases of trial-anderror that are truly creative, i.e., involving originality and spontaneity. Spontaneity thus amounts to the absence of foresight and the absence of control over the process of generating a solution to a goal and not to a denial of goal-orientedness.4 To summarize so far: creativity is opposed to routine production and technique in this sense (i.e., method). It involves originality and spontaneity. Both criteria, i.e., originality and spontaneity, can be fulfilled in degrees. Therefore, creativity comes in degrees too. This is of utmost importance, since I will show that the kind of independence (i.e., the kind of freedom) that originality and spontaneity incorporate is only a partial one.

216  Maria Kronfeldner

The obscurantist and exceptionalist tradition Plato (most prominently in the Ion, but also in the Phaidros and the Menon) already recognized that creativity is characterized by the two aspects originality and spontaneity. Yet, it is mainly because of spontaneity that Plato regarded it as extraordinary; only a few (for instance Homer but no other poets) exhibit it, according to him. The few who are creative are endowed with supra-natural powers, kissed by the muses, literally ‘out of their mind’, while others just produce novelty with knowledge and routine method (see Ion, 532c–534d). This is the origin, not just of connecting creativity to madness, but also of the more general exceptionalist and obscurantist attitudes towards creativity, which is sometimes also called ‘romantic’. Along such lines, Kant (in his Critique of Judgment) excluded scientists as well as philosophers from being truly creative. They are merely great heads (große Köpfe) and not geniuses, i.e., the only ones who are truly creative. The difference between them is not a difference in degree of excellence but a difference in kind; one is creative and the other is very intelligent. For Kant, the difference stems from the fact that geniuses create with the help of imagination and cannot tell how they do it. By contrast, scientists (like Newton) can, according to Kant, tell how they arrive at new insights. They have and use methods. Anybody can in principle learn these methods, which is why creativity (being a genius) is so exceptional and obscurantist for Kant. Kant’s account is certainly different from Plato’s but both assume that creativity is extraordinary and constitutes a case of inexplicable cognition. The tradition of such exceptionalist and obscurantist attitudes towards creativity is long and, if looked at closely, complicated – involving lots of variations of the same basic obscurantist cum exceptionalist schema.5

A strategy to criticize the obscurantist cum exceptionalist schema I will criticize this obscurantist cum exceptionalist schema from a systematic point of view, by picking out some recurring threads. The first thread is the claim that originality and spontaneity involve an opposition to causal determination, the second thread is the claim that producing real novelty amounts to a certain kind of blindness and the third thread is the claim that spontaneity points to a special, extraordinary cognitive process. The first claim, if successful, makes explaining creativity (whatever kind of explanation offered) impossible, while the second and third claim exclude, if successful, certain kinds of explanation. The second does so via a conceptual argument, while the third does it via an actual empirical, explanatory claim.

Explaining creativity  217 What I assume in the following is that, from an analytic point of view, originality and spontaneity can both be regarded as two kinds of partial independence: (a) Originality amounts to partial independence from the causal influence of an original (direct or via a human person from whom one learns how to produce an item). The assumed contrast is with learning and copying. (b) Spontaneity amounts to partial independence from the causal influence of previously acquired knowledge. The assumed contrast is with method and routine. The qualifier ‘partial’ is very important, since there is nothing in the concept of creativity that prevents us from taking into account that those who are creative use what they learned and usually stand on the proverbial ‘shoulders of giants.’ Creativity transcends the already acquired knowledge of others (originality) and of the individual whose creativity is at issue (spontaneity), but at the same time it builds on this already acquired knowledge of others and of the creative individual, and is thus partially constrained by it.6

Creativity as defying any naturalistic explanation In accordance with what I assume above, Carl R. Hausman (1984: ix, 9–18) writes that “genuine novelty” must be “unpredicted […] unaccounted for by antecedents and available knowledge, and is thus disconnected with the past.” Yet, he combines this with a contrast to causal determination as such and writes the following: “A causal view of explanation sets a framework for ways of denying that there is anything new under the sun.” According to this view, if determinism is true, there cannot be anything genuinely new and, consequently, no genuine creativity. Whatever novelty there is, it can be reduced to and derived from what was previously available. An imagined demon (or ‘God’) could have known it all along, so it wouldn’t be genuinely new. To be genuinely new, the novelty needs to transcend causal determination, it must be created ex nihilo. Such a perspective assumes that causal determination conflicts with creativity. There must be an independence from causal influences, a metaphysical freedom, involved in order to speak of genuine creativity. ‘Being creative’ is equated with ‘being free’ (in the metaphysical sense) and creativity is regarded as naturalistically inexplicable. In principle, there are three possible replies to such an inexplicability claim: one could point to non-naturalistic kinds of explanations, or one could point to in-deterministic causation as sufficient for explaining

218  Maria Kronfeldner creativity. Finally, one could resolve the alleged conflict between ­naturalistic explanation and creativity. This paper only discusses the third option.7 The obscurantist perspective actually leads to a paradox of (in-)explicability (cf. Kronfeldner 2009: 582); if an allegedly creative act is a true creative act, it is not explainable, and if it is naturalistically explainable, then it is not a true creative act. Either it is inexplicable, or what we explained is not creative. This paradox of (in-)explicability is established by pure stipulation, by equating creativity with metaphysical freedom. The problem is that this conceptual equation runs into a dilemma: • If naturalism is correct (humans with all their actions are part of ‘Nature’ and thus we can in principle explain what they do), then nobody is creative. The problem with this horn of the dilemma is that it is too narrow. After all, there seems to be agreement that there are at least some truly creative people. Yet, this horn of the dilemma would not be chosen by the obscurantist anyway, since the obscurantist reasoning is implicitly driven by anti-naturalist leanings. • However, if naturalism is wrong (as the obscurantist would assume), then unfortunately, everybody is creative. Why? Since the view equates creativity with metaphysical freedom. But metaphysical freedom – as usually conceived – holds either for all humans (with their mind, etc.) or for none. Thus, everybody is creative and in the same sense. The problem with this horn, evidently, is that it is too broad. It is too broad especially for those who believe in creativity as being exceptionalist (different in kind). It is still a problem for those who believe in a more gradual picture; the exceptionalist usually has only a few people exhibiting the extraordinary ‘gift’. Finally, even the non-exceptionalist assumes that some people are more and some are less creative. But it is not standard to assume that metaphysically some people are more and some people are less free, even if each human might be practically more or less free (to think or do this or that). In the following, I will show that metaphysical freedom is neither sufficient nor necessary for creativity. What is sufficient and necessary rather is a psychological freedom – a kind of freedom that is compatible with naturalism and thus in principle explainable. • Metaphysical freedom is not sufficient. If it were sufficient, then, as mentioned above, everybody or every allegedly ‘free’ act would count as creative, even a person voting for party XYZ in an election. It would be quite a stretch to call an act like this – even if we assume it to be

Explaining creativity  219 metaphysically free – creative. It has neither originality nor ­spontaneity in the relevant sense. • Metaphysical freedom is not necessary. To establish originality and spontaneity, all that is required is an independence from very specific causal factors (creative freedom) and not from causal determination as such (metaphysical freedom). The kind of freedom that is necessary and sufficient is creative freedom, the combination of the two core aspects of creativity: (a) Originality: partial independence from the causal influence of an ­original (direct or via a model) (opposition: learning, copying). (b) Spontaneity: partial independence from the causal influence of previously acquired knowledge (opposition: routine, method). A well-known example from the annals of the history of science is that of Friedrich A. Kekulé, which illustrates the difference between creative freedom (partial independence from certain causal influences) and metaphysical freedom. Kekulé searched for the molecular structure of the benzene molecule and he reported that he fell asleep and had the following dream: I turned my chair to the fire and dozed […] Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures, of manifold conformation; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke.8

If the report is correct, then this dream was Kekulé’s moment of insight.9 What kind of independence do we encounter in this paradigmatic example of an original and spontaneous insight? There is no evidence for or against metaphysical freedom, but there is evidence that Kekulé was skilled in visual imagination, which might have been influenced by the fact that he studied architecture before he became a chemist. In addition, Kekulé might have been subject to some visual impacts (e.g., visiting a zoo, visiting a dance performance) that influenced him when he visualized benzene in the way he reports. Yet, these causal influences do not make him less creative, i.e., they do not take away originality and spontaneity. How come? Because these influences have nothing to do with the benzene molecule. As I said elsewhere (2009: 585–587), even though his idea does not come out of nothing, his visual imagination is very likely influenced by factors that come from outside the context. Kekulé’s previous knowledge and his goal-orientedness

220  Maria Kronfeldner to find a solution to the problem of the structure of the benzene molecule made it likely that he would find the solution, but the previous knowledge and the goal-orientation were not sufficient for him to find it. He needed some inspiration from out of context – out of nothing not metaphysically, but rather relative to the problem-space he was dealing with. Such a relativized ‘out of nothing’ can account for the psychological originality and spontaneity involved. Given standard philosophical terminology, the causal influences that were involved in the emergence of his idea about benzene as forming a ring are so-called coincidental influences. Coincidences account for surprise and practical unpredictability, but they do not conflict with determinism. In a naturalistic account of creativity, coincidences replace metaphysical freedom.

Creativity as excluding certain kinds of explanations A naturalistic account – by definition – cannot claim that a phenomenon is in principle inexplicable. Yet, it can – via respective conceptual assumptions about the respective phenomenon – exclude certain kinds of explanation. If we take into account the instances of partial independence that originality and spontaneity require, this entails that explanations that reduce creativity to the influence of already acquired knowledge must fail. By necessity (i.e., by conceptual assumption), creativity requires to transcend any already acquired knowledge. This conceptual exclusion of certain kinds of explanation also stands behind claims that are part of a tradition of explaining creativity which has been called ‘Darwinian,’ since it refers to a process of ‘blind variation’ and consequent selection. Novelty in culture is understood as produced in an analogous manner, as novelty in nature is produced by a proverbial ‘blind watchmaker,’ producing lots of errors and ‘waste,’ tinkering with what is contingently at hand rather than designing things from scratch.10 The novelty produced then gets evaluated at various levels; the individual as well as the social one. Creativity in such a picture is nothing but variation and selection, where chance favours the prepared mind. The Darwinian model of naturalizing creativity was most famously defended by Donald Campbell. He wrote, for instance: Real gains must have been the products of explorations going beyond the limits of foresight or prescience, and in this sense blind. Campbell 1960: 92; emphasis added [I]n going beyond what is already known, one cannot but go blindly. If one can go wisely, this indicates already achieved wisdom of some general sort. Campbell [1974] 1987b: 57

Explaining creativity  221 This and similar remarks by others (e.g., Popper) amount to a conceptual argument about creativity; real gains must have been “blind” by definition. Gaut (this volume) calls it the “Ignorance Principle”. If creativity is defined as going beyond what is already known, that is, defined as bringing about something new (‘real gains’), then creativity excludes foresight, since foresight is defined as knowing something already. There must be some ignorance for there to be creativity. As Plato already stressed in his paradox of search in the Meno: if we know something, we cannot look for it, since we know it already; if we, however, do not know it, we cannot even look for it, since we do not know what we are looking for. That is why we cannot bring about something new by will and foresight. And that is why we make errors. A perfect God-like creator can thus not be creative, since a perfect being would have foresight and could thus prevent errors before making them. But for a God-like creator, there is no need to be creative in the narrow sense; this creator knows everything already – a truly superior but uncreative being. Such a conceptual argument assumes a certain concept of ‘blind’ as opposed to foresight, which is not the same as saying that we produce things at random or in an undirected manner. Neither creative ideas, nor biological mutations are produced randomly (in the sense that they are equally likely). Yet, biological mutations are produced in an undirected manner. Undirected variation can be defined in the following way: the occurrence of a variant X* is undirected, if and only if the occurrence of X* is not made more likely through the environment to which the organism with X has to adapt. If the occurrence is made more likely through the environment, there is a coupling between originating and selecting factors. For instance, if the occurrence of a longer neck (X*) in a giraffe is made more likely through the environment (e.g., tall trees) to which the neck (X) of the giraffe has to adapt, then the occurrence of the longer neck (X*) is directed.11 While genetic variation is still believed to be only produced in an undirected manner, ideas are normally conceived as being produced in a directed one. In human cognition, already acquired knowledge usually influences not only the production of new ideas but also the selection thereof. So, selective factors are often simultaneously producing ones, which makes the production of the ideas guided (i.e., directed in the abovedefined sense). Thus, if ‘blind’ means ‘undirected’, then the Darwinian model is wrong in explaining creativity.12 There is however a third meaning of ‘blind’ that saves the analogy between how novelty in nature and how novelty in culture is produced; in both cases, there is no guarantee that the novelty that is produced is adequate. The novelty is unjustified by origin. Even though the creative system works with previously acquired knowledge, it works without foresight and

222  Maria Kronfeldner can thus not prevent errors. Humans clearly produce inadequate ideas. We make errors and are indeed quite often ‘blind’ in that sense. If ‘blind’ only means ‘error-prone’, then the Darwinian model is evidently correct. However, it does not explain creativity, either. It just reformulates what is part of the phenomenon in an abstract manner, namely that originality and spontaneity are involved. It excludes certain kinds of explanation (via learning, method and perfect foresight), but it does not itself give an explanation of how creative ideas are produced. It just repeats the description and is thus explanatorily trivial. Claiming that the Darwinian model (if interpreted as claiming that ideas are produced based on a process of variation and selection) explains creativity would be analogous to claiming that an alleged virtus dormitiva of opium explains why opium makes you sleep. The account just repeats what is already assumed.13 Yet, this is not the end of the story of explaining creativity with reference to a Darwinian ‘blind variation’ principle. ‘Blind’ can be taken to mean more than that there are errors involved. It can be taken to refer to an unconscious, special cognitive process – a hidden chaos – that happens as part of a guided, i.e., directed production of novelty.

Creativity as practically inaccessible The assumption of a hidden chaos beneath the apparent guidedness of creative problem-solving has been defended by Dean K. Simonton (1988, 1995).14 The claim is that there is a special chance-configuration process, a special cognitive process that is in and of itself practically inexplicable, since it is unconscious, hard to access and built on randomness (or at least undirectedness). If it could be shown that there is such a cognitive process, then the Darwinian model would gain some explanatory power, since it would point to an actual causal cognitive process that explains the occurrence of creativity. The problem with this way out for the Darwinian account is that the chance-configuration process is made so ‘hidden’ that it becomes hard to assess the claim that it exists. It reaches its explanatory power only at the price of extreme unobservability and thus evidential inaccessibility. This entails that the claim about the actual cognitive process which accounts for the phenomenology of creativity is hard to test. In addition, there is evidence from cognitive studies, producing the most direct (even though still indirect) evidence on unconscious cognitive processes, which seems not to speak in favour of Simonton’s chance-configuration hypothesis.15 However, since the empirical evidence might well change, the philosophical point that can be derived from this is quite limited but decisive nonetheless; as long as there is

Explaining creativity  223 no conclusive evidence from cognitive science about the hidden chaos, the Darwinian model has not succeeded in providing any convincing explanatory information on creativity. To sum up, the core issue about the Darwinian model applied to the cognitive level is: despite its naturalistic orientation, it assumes a special, extraordinary cognitive process. In addition, this is a cognitive process hypothesized especially for creativity, which is in danger of being ad hoc. The account gains explanatory power, but only at the price of keeping the cognitive process ‘hidden’ and ‘special’, which amounts to practical inexplicability. If we take the previous section and this one together, the argument is that the Darwinian model fails to explain creativity either because it confuses description with explanation (if blind means error-prone), or because it falls victim to left-overs from the long philosophical tradition of regarding creativity as inexplicable and extraordinary. It postulates an extra creative cognitive process that is so hidden that it is practically inaccessible as well as inexplicable. Finally, it is unlikely that the model supports a view where creativity is a matter of more or less. Creativity is still conceived as extraordinary – even though now predominantly at the level of kinds of cognitive processes rather than at the level of kinds of people. The model does not preclude that individuals exhibit the hidden cognitive process more or less. After all, Campbell (and later Dennett and others) applied their model even to all living creatures. There is a cascade of variation-and-selection processes culminating in humans, but despite this graduality, the model postulates a special kind of cognitive process accounting for novelty – in nature, mind or culture. There is thus a smack of extraordinariness left – and still no explanation reached.

The ordinary process view: an alternative? In the meantime, some theorists in creativity research have given up searching for an extraordinary process underlying creativity (or insight, as psychologists prefer to call the core of creativity in the narrow sense discussed here). They point towards ordinary cognitive processes. According to this ordinary-process view, creativity can be demystified as ordinary cognition. Some of these ordinary processes might well be unconscious and more specific for problems that show the characteristic spontaneous ‘Aha’ experience, but others are not. For instance, the representational-change theory, defended by Knoblich et al. (1999, 2001), focuses on unconscious processes of changing the representation of a problem, while the progress-monitoring theory, defended e.g., MacGregor et al. (2001), stresses conscious heuristics that monitor progress in problem-solving.16 In addition, the assumption is sometimes that the many cognitive processes

224  Maria Kronfeldner involved operate – in the case of insight – at their highest efficiency and in a complex manner. The ordinary processes assumed to make up creativity are, for instance perception, visual imagery, diverse cognitive heuristics such as distortion, repetition, omission and mixing parts of concepts and images, constraint relaxation, chunk decomposition, associational linkage, conceptual combination, analogical reasoning, abstraction, use of metaphors, conceptual expansion, memory retrieval, spreading activation, opportunistic assimilation and so on. In a nutshell, the ordinary-process view claims that to explain creativity one does not require a special process of chance-configuration. The more radical ordinary-process view perspectives even hold that there is no particular mental operation that only creative people and nobody else can perform. As Bowden et al. (2005: 323) write: “there are multiple ways in which an insight can be produced”. There will then be evidence for all of the diverse cognitive processes discussed as part of the overarching ordinary-process view without one cognitive process ‘being the winner that takes it all.’17 In addition, these multiple cognitive processes can interact in complex but highly efficient ways, and at the moment of insight at quite a high speed, and some of them (e.g., perception) on auto-pilot (i.e., not consciously monitored). These aspects – multiplicity, speed, complexity, auto-pilot – and not a hidden unconscious chaos explain why creative agents act spontaneously, and with that they explain why these creative agents often cannot report or reconstruct how they came up with their ideas and why it is so hard to predict the occurrence of creativity. [C]reative thought is not a simple, uniform process. Instead, multiple ­processes, strategies, and mental operations may be involved, applied by different people, in different ways, at different points in a creative effort. Mumford 1999: 344 What distinguishes the highly creative individual from the only modestly creative one is the confluence of multiple factors, rather than extremely high levels of any particular factor or even the possession of a distinctive trait. Sternberg and Sternberg 2016: 43418

What is extraordinary about creativity is multiple and gradual: multiplicity, speed, complexity and the degree of auto-piloting of the ordinary cognitive processes involved vary depending on the amount of training and skill developed. There is no one talent or skill. There is only a network of trained abilities.19 This ordinary-process view still regards creativity to be practically hard to access. After all, complexity is often just another word for ‘hard to access’. Nonetheless, the ordinary-process view is an important step

Explaining creativity  225 forward towards explaining creativity. The view does not start with the ­assumption that there is a special cognitive process involved. It is thus remotest from the philosophical tradition with respect to exceptionalist assumptions, since not only does it get rid of the attitude that only few of us can be creative, but it also discards the residuals of the paradigm, namely that there is something extraordinary about creativity, in the person or in the cognitive processes involved. Why is this good? If we are not biased towards the exceptionalist concept, parsimony tells us to try first to go with ordinary processes only. To put it into an evolutionary argument: why should a special cognitive process for creativity evolve if combining and speeding up normal cognitive processes would do it? For the purpose of explanation, the ordinary process view is less laden with philosophical background assumptions and there is at least direct evidence that these processes exist, even though it is still hard to explain how – in their complex interaction and speed – they can account for actual occurrences of creativity.

Summary on the prospects of explaining creativity Creativity is hard to explain, like the weather. As science has made progress with the latter, it will make progress with the former as well. Complexity is a practical, transient obstacle, not an in-principle one. It is also likely, given the ordinary process view, that creativity is not an ability that only few of us have. This holds despite differences in degree with respect to the ‘outstanding’ results produced by specific individuals. Not everyone is a creative storm that changes the intellectual landscape. Yet, as we learned from the early Greek philosophers who started to emancipate philosophy from religion, even a storm operates on natural principles; these are the same principles that account for a mild, refreshing wind on a normal day. No exceptionalities or mysteries are needed to account for either of them. The same holds for creativity. No special process, no exceptionalities are needed to explain any of its occurrences, be it wild or mild.

Acknowledgements Many thanks to my CEU colleagues for feedback, and especially Guenther Knoblich, Natalie Sebanz, and Balazs Vedres for organizing the university-wide faculty seminar on “Chance and Necessity in Discovery and Innovation: An Opportunity for Social Minds?“ in Feb 2016. This paper profited a lot from this seminar, and in particular from the continued discussion with Guenther on the state-of-the-art in cognitive sciences. I also want to thank Berys Gaut, Matthew Kieran and Alexander Reutlinger for their very helpful critical feedback on the paper.

226  Maria Kronfeldner

Notes 1 This paper integrates arguments that were developed in detail in Kronfeldner (2009, 2010, 2011). In this paper, the focus is on reviewing the situation on whether or not creativity is explainable and if so, in which sense it is. 2 See Gaut (2009) for more details on this contrast and on how to distinguish routine learning (following algorithms) from skill (which includes rules of thumb). Only routine, a ‘mechanical’ process is incompatible with creativity. 3 See Kronfeldner (2009: 580–581) for more details. 4 I take the distinction between true and pseudo-serendipity from Roberts (1989); see Kronfeldner (2011: 38–41) for details and examples. Gaut (2009) also stresses that creativity does not exclude goal-orientedness. I agree. 5 A complete in-depth history of theorizing about creativity is, to the best of my knowledge, not yet available. See, however, for instance Blumenberg (1957) and Mahrenholz (2010), who covered many important aspects from ‘Plato to Nato’. The concept of genius has gotten some in-depth coverage, e.g., in the two volumes of Schmidt (1985) for the period between the years 1750–1945, or in the analysis of the Vienna circle member Edgar Zilsel (1918, 1926). 6 This also signals that creativity happens in the minds of people, but it is not reducible to that level of analysis. It is as much social as it is individual. For the social level, see Amabile (1996) or Wheeler (this volume). 7 Dealing with non-naturalistic kinds of explanation would lead us too far away, into the muddy waters of the philosophy of explanation, which already struggles to include non-causal naturalistic explanations in a common frame with causal explanation (see Reutlinger, forthcoming). With respect to the second option, I assume, without having the space to argue for it here, that reducing creativity to in-deterministic causation does not capture the core aspects of originality and spontaneity. 8 For background on his case and the quotation, see Findlay (1968: 34–41, 39). 9 Historians have accumulated some evidence that the report is not correct. See Wotiz and Rudofsky (1984) as well as Rudofsky and Wotiz (1988). Rudofsky and Wotiz criticize using the example as evidence for insight in historical and psychological scholarship. I agree with their criticism, but I still think that we can treat the case as an illustrative example, as a hypothetical paradigmatic example of what we mean when we talk about creativity. It is a usage common in conceptual analysis (see also note 13 below) that certainly does not allow to explain creativity via the example, or to take the example as evidence for one or another scientific theory of creativity. 10 There are similar models of trials and error prior to or independent of the Darwinian model. In the mid-nineteenth century, Alexander Bain (1855) formulated a theory of learning based on trialand-error, a principle that was a mathematical tool, the so-called “Rule of False” before it became incorporated as a theoretical principle in psychology and evolutionary thinking. See Cowles (2015) on that history. Later, Poincaré (1908), a famous mathematician, tried to naturalize creativity by comparing it to a random dance of gas molecules of which some match the ‘hooks’ of the human mind and become conscious. See Boden (this volume) for further aspects of comparing creativity in nature with creativity in minds. 11 See Kronfeldner (2010, 2011: 17–22) for a detailed analysis of the different options to interpret ‘blind’ in claims about creativity, offering a formal analysis of undirectedness in the biological sense. Simonton (2013) builds on this and offers an even more formal reconstruction of ‘blind’ along the lines of the above definition of blind as undirectedness, stressing that creativity and sightedness are mathematically inversely related and that directedness (sightedness) comes in degrees. This gives me the chance to comment on his interpretation of my account, since it involves a misinterpretation: I claimed that undirectedness cannot have degrees, while directness comes in degrees. “[D]irectedness is a matter of degree, whereas undirectedness is simply the absence or negation of any directendess and thus (logically) not a matter of degree.” (Kronfeldner 2010: 196) I went on distinguishing between complete coupling and partial coupling (i.e., complete and partial directedness). Simonton interpreted me as saying that neither undirectedness nor directedness can come in degrees.

Explaining creativity  227 12 For details, see Kronfeldner (2010, 2011: 53–74). Even true serendipity is guided, i.e., directed in the sense of cognitive coupling of producing and selecting factors (ibid. 56–58). 13 See Kronfeldner (2011: 10–12) for details on the concept of explanatory triviality assumed here. It contrasts with heuristic triviality. In brief: heuristic triviality is not saying anything new; explanatory triviality is not saying anything explanatory. Thus, adding something to the description of a phenomenon, in a way that enters any serious conceptual analysis, is certainly not heuristically trivial, but it might well be explanatorily trivial, depending on the kind of information added. Only some information about a phenomenon is explanatory. The claim made here is thus compatible with Berys Gaut’s remarks about spontaneity, analyticity and triviality (this volume, section on spontaneity, footnote). Whether or not a formal, mathematical reconstruction of the concept of creativity adds empirical, descriptive content, as Simonton (2013: 262) assumes, is another matter that I cannot discuss here. Yet, in any case, it does not explain creativity in the causal sense assumed in the criterion of explanatory triviality. 14 Simonton has since published further works and not all of them rely on the claim of a special cognitive process. Stein and Lipton (1989: 39f) also defend such compatibility and use the term “hidden chaos”, but in a different sense than Simonton on whom I will concentrate here. For a critique of Stein and Lipton, see Kronfeldner (2010, 2011: 61–63). 15 See Kronfeldner (2011: 65–71) for a review of the indirect evidence up to a certain point. 16 For a comparison between the two see also: Öllinger et al. (2013). Bowden et al. (2005: 322), in reviewing the differences between representational-change theory and progress-monitoring theory, call the first the “special process” view and the second the “business as usual” view. The difference between his terminology and mine is this: the representational-change theory is also an ordinary-process view in my terminology, even though it is a “special process“ view in theirs, referring to a process that is of special importance to understanding certain aspects of insight and thus creativity, but otherwise perfectly ordinary and accessible by the means of cognitive science. 17 Öllinger et al (2013) take such an integrative stance, for instance. They treat representationalchange theory and progress-monitoring theory as addressing different aspects of insight. 18 See also: Weisberg (1993), Ward et al. (1999: 190–191) and Boden (2004: 260ff). The accounts of these authors certainly differ, but not in ways that matter for the point under discussion here. 19 With the term ‘ability’ I want to stay neutral with respect to the distinction between creativity as a disposition or capacity (Gaut, this volume). An ability, in my terminology, can be a disposition or a capacity in Gaut’s terminology.

References Amabile, T. (1996) Creativity in context, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Bain, A. (1855) The senses and the intellect, London: Parker. Blumenberg, H. (1957) Nachahmung Der Natur: Zur Vorgeschichte Der Idee Des Schöpferischen Menschen. Studium Generale – Zeitschrift für die Einheit der Wissenschaften im Zusammenhang ihrer Begriffsbildungen und Forschungsmethoden 10: 266–83. Boden, M. (2004) The creative mind: Myths and mechanism, London and New York: Parker. Bowden, E. M., Jung-Beeman, M., Fleck, J. and Kounios, J. (2005) ‘New approaches to demystifying insight’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9: 322–328. Campbell, D. T. (1960) ‘Blind variation and selective retention in creative thought as in other knowledge processes’, In Radnitzky, G. and Bartley, W. W. (eds.), Evolutionary epistemology: Rationality and the Sociology of Knowledge, Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court, pp. 91–114.

228  Maria Kronfeldner Campbell, D. T. (1974) ‘Evolutionary epistemology’, In Radnitzky, G. and Bartley, W. W. (eds.), Evolutionary epistemology: Rationality and the Sociology of Knowledge, LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publ., pp. 47–89. Cowles, H. M. (2015) ‘Hypothesis bound: Trial and error in the nineteenth century’, Isis 106: 635–645. Findlay, A. (1968) A hundred years of chemistry, 3rd ed., London, Duckworth. Gaut, B. (2009) ‘Creativity and skill’, In Krausz, M., Dutton, D. and Bardsley, K. (eds.), The idea of creativity:, Philosophy of history and culture, Boston, MA: Brill, pp. 83–104. Hausman, C. R. (1984) A discourse on novelty and creation, Albany, NY, SUNY Press. Knoblich, G., Ohlsson, S., Haider, H. and Rhenius, D. (1999) ‘Constraint relaxation and chunk decomposition in insight problem solving’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 25: 1534–1555. Knoblich, G., Ohlsson, S. and Raney, G. E. (2001) ‘An eye movement study of insight problem solving’, Memory & Cognition 29: 1000–1009. Kronfeldner, M. (2009) ‘Creativity naturalized’, Philosophical Quarterly 59: 577–592. Kronfeldner, M. (2010) ‘Darwinian “blind” hypothesis formation revisited’, Synthese 175: 193–218. Kronfeldner, M. (2011) Darwinian Creativity and Memetics, Durham, NC: Acumen. MacGregor, J. N., Ormerod, T. C. and Chronicle, E. P. (2001) ‘Information processing and insight: A process model of performance on the nine-dot and related problems’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 27: 176–201. Mahrenholz, S. (2010) Kreativität – Eine philosophische Analyse, Berlin: AkademieVerlag. Mumford, M. D. (1999) ‘Blind variation or selective variation? Evaluative elements in creative thought’, Psychological Inquiry 10: 344–348. Öllinger, M, Jones G, Faber, A. H. and Knoblich, G. (2013) ‘Cognitive Mechanisms of Insight: The role of heuristics and representational change in solving the eight-coin problem’, Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition 39 (3): 931–939. Poincaré, H. (1908) ‘L’ invention mathematique’, In Poincare, H. (ed.), Science et Methode, Paris: Flammurion, pp. 43–63. Reutlinger, A. forthc. ‘Explanation beyond causation? New directions in the philosophy of scientific explanation’, To appear in: Philosophy Compass. Roberts, R. M. (1989) Serendipity: Accidental discoveries in science, New York, Wiley. Rudofsky, S. F. and Wotiz, J. H. (1988) ‘Psychologists and the Dream Accounts of August Kekulé’, Ambix 35: 31–38. Schmidt, J. (1985) Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik, 1750–1945, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Simonton, D. K. (1988) Scientific genius: A psychology of science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Explaining creativity  229 Simonton, D. K. (1995) ‘Foresight in insight? A Darwinian answer’, In Sternberg, R. J. and Davidson, J. E. (eds.), The nature of insight, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 465–494. Simonton, D. K. (2013) ‘Creative thought as blind variation and selective retention: Why creativity is inversely related to sightedness’, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 33: 253–266. Stein, E. and Lipton, P. (1989) ‘Where guesses come from: Evolutionary epistemology and the anomaly of guided variation’, Biology and Philosophy 4: 33–56. Sternberg, R. J. and Sternberg, K. (2016) Cognitive Psychology, Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning. Ward, T. B., Smith, S. M. and Finke, R. A. (1999) ‘Creative cognition’, In Sternberg, R. J. (ed.), Handbook of creativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 189–212. Weisberg, R. W. (1993) Creativity: Beyond the myth of genius, New York: Freeman and Company. Wotiz, J. H. and Rudofsky, S. (1984) ‘Kekule’s dreams: Fact or fiction?’, Chemistry in Britain 20: 720–3. Zilsel, E. (1918) Die Geniereligion; ein kritischer Versuch über das moderne Persönlichkeit­ sideal mit einer historischen Begründung, Wien: Braumüller. Zilsel, E. (1926) Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffes: Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte der Antike und des Frühkapitalismus, Tübingen: Mohr.

14 Talking about more than heads The embodied, embedded and extended creative mind Michael Wheeler

Introduction: the path of creation In the opening paragraph of his fascinating book, How Music Works, the vocalist, guitarist, songwriter and former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne1 describes what he calls the ‘romantic notion’ of creativity, in the following words: [C]reation emerges out of some interior emotion, from an upwelling of passion or feeling… the creative urge will brook no accommodation… it simply must find an outlet to be heard, read, or seen. The accepted narrative suggests that a classical composer gets a strange look in his or her eye and begins furiously scribbling a fully realized composition that couldn’t exist in any other form. Or that the rock-and-roll singer is driven by desire and demons, and out bursts this amazing, perfectly shaped song that had to be three minutes and twelve seconds – nothing more, nothing less. Byrne 2012: 13

What Byrne calls the ‘romantic notion’ of creativity is, I suggest, the conventional wisdom about creativity: the essential properties of the created product are determined (‘fully realized’) both by and within certain internal psychological (emotional and cognitive) states and processes, and are then implemented in (they ‘burst out into’) the external world. In other words, on the romantic/conventional picture, creativity has an inside-to-outside logic of explanation. Of course, the details will occasionally be messy. Thus, a songwriter might work out the final steps in a particular melodic progression by actually playing the guitar or the piano. But the creativity-romantic will treat any such goings-on either as exercises in fine-tuning, or as a matter of revealing the minutiae of a basically preformed inner creation.2 Byrne opposes the romantic/conventional picture. He says: ‘I think the path of creation is almost 180° from [that] model. I believe that we unconsciously and instinctively make work to fit preexisting formats’ (ibid.: 13). According to Byrne’s alternative model, then, the internal psychological processes that contribute to acts of creation mould and adaptively fit their products to ‘pre-existing formats’, where the term ‘pre-existing’

Talking about more than heads  231 signals, among other things, that the formats in question are external to the ­psychological processes concerned. (More on exactly what the term ‘formats’ means soon.) So the essential properties of the created product (e.g. the artwork) are determined by certain external structures that are somehow captured by the internal psychological processes concerned. In other words, for Byrne, creativity has an outside-to-inside logic of explanation. Having advocated this way of thinking, Byrne follows it to its natural endpoint: the most impressive examples of creativity – instances of true genius – are those in which the created product is best suited to a particular format. As he puts it: ‘[g]enius – the emergence of a truly remarkable and memorable work – seems to appear when a thing is perfectly suited to its context’ (ibid.: 29). In what follows, I shall argue that Byrne’s official model of creativity fails to do justice to a complex and intertwined relationship that often obtains, between the internal and the external, in the path of creation. So, whereas Byrne resists the romantic/conventional account of creativity by, in effect, reversing the direction of its explanatory logic – that is, by recommending that we shift from an inside-to-outside logic to an outsideto-inside one – I shall use a combination of theoretical articulation and illuminating examples to suggest that both these models are ultimately inadequate, because creativity routinely has an entangled, inside-and-­ outside logic. Just what this means will become clearer as we go along, but the tagline is that the creative mind is embodied, embedded and extended.3

Niche products To bring Byrne’s account of creativity into better focus, it will be useful to approach it by way of some claims made by Margaret Boden (1990, 2004, 2010, this volume). Boden characterizes creativity as ‘the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable’ (Boden 2004: 1). For now, let’s focus on newness and surprise, and come back to value later. Boden unpacks newness in terms of a distinction between psychological (or individual) creativity (newness to the person who produces the idea or artefact) and historical creativity (the special case of psychological creativity in which the newness is also newness in human history). Given our interests here, it is psychological creativity that we really care about. Boden then proceeds to identify three kinds of surprise that correspond to three forms of psychological creativity. Roughly: (i) an unfamiliar combination of familiar ideas; (ii) an unexpected idea revealed within an alreadyavailable conceptual space (where a conceptual space is, roughly, a style of thinking; more on this below); and (iii) an apparently impossible idea resulting from a transformation of a conceptual space. Given this tripartite framework, one might be tempted to think of Byrne’s favoured account of creativity as being tantamount to, and thus as being limited to, Boden’s

232  Michael Wheeler second form of creativity, that is, as a process of exploring already-available conceptual spaces. Indeed, if Byrne-style pre-existing formats were equivalent to, or versions of, Boden-style conceptual spaces, there would seem to be some mileage in this idea. Boden even appeals to the notion of ‘fit’ with an existing conceptual space when she introduces her second kind of creativity (ibid.: 3). Despite such lures, however, the invitation to think of Byrne’s account in this sort of register should be resisted. To explain: Byrne develops his account of creativity via a series of historical examples, and it soon becomes clear that the term ‘format’ should be given a very broad interpretation, because the set of external elements to which created products are claimed to be moulded and fitted comes to encompass a wide range of physical, social and technological structures. For example: Contexts (Byrne 2012: 29; see also 252–62): consider the music scene that grew up in and around the club CBGB in New York in the mid- to late 1970s, a scene which was pivotal in the careers of Patti Smith, Television and Talking Heads, among others. According to Byrne, this scene depended for its development not only on the talents of the various artists concerned, but also, and essentially, on a bundle of external factors such as, for example: appropriately sized and located venues that allowed artists to play their own music; the club policy at CBGB of allowing band members free entry on their nights off; a general social atmosphere of alienation from the prevailing music scene; and low-cost rents in the neighbourhood around the club so that artists could live in the area where the scene emerged. Physical Spaces: consider again CBGB, whose size, lack of reverberation and noisy bar-like atmosphere shaped the kind of music that Talking Heads came to write (ibid.: 14–15). The first two properties meant that the details in the music could be heard, allowing a certain intricacy in musical structure (witness also the complex dual guitar interplay of Television), while the third meant that the artists had to play loud. Social Expectations: Scott Joplin observed that jazz solos and improvisations were born in dance joints, because the written music would run out before the energy and enthusiasm of the dancing crowd did (ibid.: 21). Technological Innovations: the limited data storage available on early vinyl records meant not only that most pop songs in that era were written so as to be less than four minutes long (ibid.: 92), but also that some classical music compositions started to incorporate decrescendos at the point where the record would need to be turned over, and crescendos at the beginning of the next side, in order to ensure a smooth transition in the listening experience (ibid.: 93).

It is hard to see how the kinds of structures that Byrne identifies here as examples of pre-existing formats could qualify as Boden-style conceptual

Talking about more than heads  233 spaces. After all, Boden (2004: 4) glosses conceptual spaces as ‘structured styles of thought’ and as ‘disciplined way[s] of thinking,’ and her flagship examples include genres of music, dance, visual art and architecture, as well as scientific theories and styles of cooking. By contrast, Byrnestyle pre-existing formats are a motley crew of physical, technological and socially distributed external factors that are perhaps most illuminatingly understood as the environmental niches in which the three forms of creativity highlighted by Boden unfold, and in which, therefore, conceptual spaces are explored and transformed. This way of interpreting Byrne-style pre-existing formats allows us to couch the outside-to-inside logic of Byrne’s account of creativity in a recognizably Darwinian language. Thus the path of creation, as Byrne understands it, may be described as a process of adaptive fit to some environmental niche (pre-existing format). More specifically, created products become adapted to their environmental niches through a process in which human psychological activity shapes the created products under development to those niches. Importantly, this Darwinian gloss on creativity is not a foreign imposition on Byrne’s own way of thinking: he himself interprets the creative process in such terms. For example, he describes percussive African music as ‘a living thing [that] evolved to fit the available niche’ (ibid.: 16). Once we view Byrne’s account in light of such remarks, it soon becomes clear that a relevant process of adaptive fit may take us beyond the ‘mere’ exploration of conceptual spaces, and be a factor in the transformation of those spaces. Indeed, when discussing the CBGB-centred New York music scene, Byrne characterizes its elements (see above) as ‘guidelines that can steer you away from what might at first seem like obvious or logical moves’ (ibid.: 266). Steering of this sort may lead one to unexplored territory in an existing conceptual space (such as, arguably, Television’s use of technically proficient dual guitar interplay within a musical sub-genre born of garage rock), but it may also lead one out of one’s established conceptual spaces altogether (such as, arguably, Patti Smith’s experimental fusion of punk rock and poetry). In Darwinian language, one might think of the latter, transformative kind of episode as a speciation event, in which the adaptation of some created product to the environmental niche provided by a certain pre-existing format results in various traits of an existing creative form being modified in such a way that we witness the emergence of a new creative form. It might seem that the Darwinian terminology with which we have just been working is meant to be heard in a wholly metaphorical register. Is traditional percussive African music really to be categorized as a living organism? However, although this particular aspect of Byrne’s striking image is (presumably) not to be taken literally, there is good reason to treat the claim that such music is under selective pressure to adapt to its environmental

234  Michael Wheeler niche as a full-blooded truth. After all, as an abstract logic of how change in populations occurs, Darwinian selection has been applied to non-living entities such as, but not limited to, scientific theories (e.g. van Fraassen 1980), technological knowledge (e.g. Ziman 2000) and configurations in industry (e.g. Nelson 2002). Moreover, in another area where a dominant inside-to-outside explanatory logic has been challenged, namely the study of the evolution of language, the idea that a human-produced structure is rightly conceptualized as an entity that is under selective pressure to adapt to its environmental niche has already been advanced as a literal truth – and to great scientific advantage. To explain: Natural languages have the property of compositionality. That is, they feature atomic elements (words) that may be combined using structure-sensitive rules (grammars), so as to yield complex molecular structures (sentences) whose meanings are a systematic function of the meanings of the atomic elements concerned plus the structure-sensitive rules by which those elements are combined. Now, according to a certain popular psycholinguistic picture, the linguistic-haves and the linguistic-have-nots in our world possess fundamentally different brains, in the specific sense that the brains of the former, but not those of the latter, are thought to contain some sort of innate domain-specific language processing system, one whose fundamental structure is itself compositional in form (e.g. a Chomskyan language acquisition device; see e.g. Chomsky 1986). On this view, the structural properties of public language come from the innate domainspecific language processing system. That’s about as inside-to-outside as an explanatory logic gets. However, Simon Kirby and his colleagues have used computer simulations to show that if (a) one places language in its correct learning context, that is, one conceptualizes it as being passed on from one generation to the next by cultural, rather than genetic, transmission; (b) one begins, as seems evolutionarily likely, with a holistic language (one in which there is no systematic mapping from the structure of the symbols used to the structure of the meanings conveyed); (c) there is, as many have suggested, a transmission bottleneck in the language learning process (such that learners are exposed only to some impoverished subset of the language); and (d) language learners have a rudimentary domain-independent generalization capacity, then the language in question will evolve compositionality.4 This result comes about because (roughly) compositional languages are generalizable languages, and generalizable languages can be recreated in each generation without exposure to the whole language. This makes compositional languages more evolutionarily stable, so that once a generalizing learner, by chance, stumbles across compositional structure, that structure will spread throughout the population. Whether the explanatory logic of the model of language evolution advocated by Kirby and colleagues is strictly outside-to-inside, in a way

Talking about more than heads  235 that is equivalent to the explanatory logic of Byrne’s model of creativity, is not what matters here. The key point is that, on both accounts, a humanproduced structure is conceptualized as evolving to fit its environmental niche: natural language evolves under selection pressures established principally by the properties of its evolutionary conduit, a distributed system of human brains communicating via information bottlenecks, while created products evolve under selection pressures established by a range of pre-existing formats (such as contexts, physical spaces, social expectations and technological developments). Given that the key claims made by the former model are literal in character, and given that the former model is in good scientific standing, we have some reason to treat the pivotal claims made by the latter model as being more than mere metaphor.5 Cultural transmission gives us a powerful way of thinking about a pop­ ulation-level process by which the adaptive fitting of created products may happen. Such products evolve to fit environmental niches in virtue of the selection of variations and recombinations in culturally transmitted structures. Thus, the intricate and layered rhythms of traditional African percussive music, which are passed on from one cultural generation of drummers to the next, are musical forms that don’t become obscured in the open air as they would in many indoor spaces. In this way, they are adapted to their sonic environment. On Byrne’s account of creativity, however, adaptive fitting is not only a population-level process. As we have heard already, individual creative agents ‘unconsciously and instinctively make work to fit preexisting formats’ (Byrne 2012: 13). It is here, at the level of individuals and their psychological states and processes, that the adaptive fitting model, as Byrne characterizes it, seems, to me, to overlook something interesting and important about the path of creation. More precisely, it fails to do justice to the complex and subtle relations between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ that are exhibited, in many examples of creativity, by organic human brains in dynamic causal entanglement with the very kinds of external elements that Byrne highlights, elements such as contexts, physical spaces, social expectations and technology. So, when we think about individuals and their psychological states and processes, we need to shift not to an outside-to-inside logic, but to an inside-and-outside logic. According to the latter logic, creativity is not so much a matter of the inner fitting of its products and processing to the structure of the outer (a direction of explanatory travel which, in a sense, privileges the contribution of the outer), as it is a kind of interactive dialogue or partnership (in which inner and outer make interlocking and complementary contributions). In order to bring this more entangled path of creation into view, I shall briefly investigate three ways in which it is realized, in the embodiment, the embeddedness, and ultimately the extension of the creative mind.

236  Michael Wheeler

Embodied creativity According to the embodied cognition perspective, psychological states and processes are routinely shaped, in fundamental ways, by non-neural bodily factors. One’s first reaction to this proposal might be that it is unclear what it amounts to, until someone tells us what the terms ‘shaped’ and ‘fundamental’ mean. That much is certainly true, but here I shall not attempt to provide the kind of theoretical discussion that would ultimately be needed. In part, this is simply a matter of available space. The embodied cognition ‘movement’ is home to a miscellaneous assortment of projects. Thus, embodiment is said to shape, in fundamental ways, things like the nature of concepts (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980), the nature of perceptual experience (e.g. Noë 2004), and the nature of the processing mechanisms that enable action (in the philosophical literature, see e.g. Clark 1997, 2008; Wheeler 2005, 2011). This list is not exhaustive. Given such a diversity of topics, it seems unlikely that the terms in question will reward concise or general definitions. Fortunately, however, we can make do with a roughand-ready negative characterization of the key idea, in the sense of a general picture of what it is to believe that psychological states and processes are not routinely shaped, in fundamental ways, by non-neural bodily factors. In its orthodox form, contemporary cognitive theory has a neurocentric bias. This bias isn’t irrational. For example, cognitive science has taken great strides forward precisely by working on the assumption that the brain is where the action is. Nevertheless, from an embodied cognition perspective, neuro-centrism remains a bias, and a misleading one at that. Of course, even the most hardened fan of the brain believes that the non-neural body plays a cognition-enabling role, in helping to harvest perceptual data for the brain through movement and orientation, and in executing the motion instructions that are generated by the brain in action. Moreover, on the orthodox model, the non-neural body can certainly affect what we think and do by (in a way that will soon be illustrated by an example) placing constraints on the representational and instructional states formed by the neurally located mind. However, from the perspective of orthodox cognitive theory, these contributions remain essentially no more than input-output bit-parts in the great psychological drama. At root, the relationship between the cognitive system and the non-neural body is tantamount to the relationship between a computer and its keyboard-and-monitor peripherals. As one might put it, the non-neural body provides the keyboards and the monitors for the neurally located computational mind. The embodied cognition perspective says that non-neural bodily factors are far more important to our psychology than that. One’s second reaction to the embodied cognition perspective, as stated, might be that, in the context of the present discussion, it is beside the

Talking about more than heads  237 point, since it does not imply causal entanglement with external elements. In fact, to the extent that the embodiment in question is grounded in bodily acts, such as, say, the physical manipulations of instruments or tools, embodiment naturally encompasses a rich mode of environmental interaction (which is to say that there is a natural route from the embodied mind to the embedded mind – see next section). Moreover, the notion of ‘internal’ is itself slippery, since the boundary between internal and external is, in some contexts, fixed by the skin (in which case gross bodily forms count as internal), while in others it is fixed by the limits of the brain or central nervous system (in which case gross bodily forms count as external). For the purposes of the present section, I shall exploit this ambiguity and treat the non-neural body as an external factor, on the grounds that Byrne’s characterization of the romantic view of creativity clearly takes the essential properties of created products to be determined by psychological states and processes that contemporary cognitive theory ordinarily takes to be located in the brain. So much for embodied cognition in general. Let’s turn specifically to embodied creative cognition. As just noted, the orthodox, neuro-centric approach to mind dovetails neatly with the inside-to-outside model of creativity in which the essential properties of created products are determined in the brain and then simply implemented by, or via, the body, perhaps with some feedback-driven fine-tuning. But you may ask yourself whether this model is adequate to explain certain high-grade examples of creativity, such as playing (and, by extension, writing) the delta blues like Robert Johnson. To see why neuro-centrism comes up short, consider a science-fiction scenario in which Robert Johnson’s brain is transplanted into my non-neural body. In spite of the fact that the pre-operation me has some guitar playing ability, I submit that there is no guarantee at all that this operation would result in a being (whoever it is—personal identity is not the issue here) who is capable of generating country blues songs based on majestic guitar patterns such as those that drive ‘Preaching Blues’ or ‘If I had Possession over Judgement Day.’ To revisit one of Byrne’s images, whatever desires and demons our newly constructed hybrid artist might harbour in his brain, they are unlikely to burst out as perfectly shaped, Johnson-style country blues songs. The reason for this is that non-neural bodily factors such as the muscular adaptations in Johnson’s arms and hands are partial, but nevertheless essential, determinants of Johnson’s distinctive guitar playing style and thus of his ground-breaking outputs. In response to this claim, the neuro-centrist might endeavour to quarantine the identified shortfall as ‘no more than’ a deficit in the realization or implementation of the created structures, rather than as evidence of an inadequacy in the neuro-centric model of creativity itself. But this strategy is doomed to fail, as becomes clear, I think, if we borrow some analytical

238  Michael Wheeler machinery from John Haugeland (1998). The neuro-centric model of intelligent (including creative) action works like this. The brain (the seat of the mind) decides what needs to be done. It then sends a set of instructions to the body, in order to generate appropriate movements. At the point of sending, the semantic content of the instruction – ‘play a D7 chord,’ say – is settled. The job of the arms and hands is to decode that semantic content, and thus the transmitted instruction. But, as Haugeland observes, this image of decoded instructions underestimates the intimacy of the coupling between (i) the signals sent out from the brain down neural pathways to the muscle fibres in my arms and hands, plus the tactile and proprioceptive feedback signals produced by the subsequent movements; and (ii) non-neural bodily factors such as the lengths of my fingers, and the strengths and response profiles of my muscles and joints. If this is correct, then the neural signals highlighted in (i), including crucially those signals sent out by the brain that are candidates for being instructions, will have to be understood as entirely specific to a particular embodied individual, meaning that ‘there need be no way – even in principle, and with God’s own microsurgery – to reconnect my neurons to anyone else’s fingers, such that I could reliably type or tie my shoes with them’ (ibid.: 225). The same goes for our example of playing the blues like Robert Johnson. At this juncture, it might be suggested that Robert Johnson’s newly transplanted brain could, after some stretch of time, succeed in the generating Johnson-like delta blues songs using my body, by training my muscles to play in a specifically Johnson-esque style. There will, of course, be limits to this adaptive process ( Johnson’s brain presumably couldn’t stimulate the growth of longer fingers, for example), but that’s not the most telling response to the objection. Rather, one needs to focus on the very form of the suggestion. Why does the critic reach straight for the thought that my muscles could be adapted to the playing style of Johnson’s brain, rather than the thought that Johnson’s brain could be adapted to the playing style of my muscles? The answer, I submit, is that the objection simply assumes that the phenomenon of playing style resides in the brain. Of course, that’s a presumption that the advocate of embodied creativity will want to deny as a neuro-centric prejudice. Indeed, if creativity is properly embodied, then style is something that is neither solely in the brain nor solely in certain non-neural bodily factors, but instead is distributed over both. So although it might be true, in any particular case, that a transplant victim will end up producing artworks in a style that is associated with the formerly existing embodied individual where the brain in question was previously housed, there need be no guarantee – even in principle, and with God’s own training regime – that this will be possible. Taking a different approach, the neuro-centrist might complain that the thought experiment under consideration does not, in fact, undermine the

Talking about more than heads  239 instructionist model, but shows only that one should relativize the content of certain neural signals to a particular body. On this view, the signal from Robert Johnson’s brain counts as an instruction to ‘play a D7 chord’ only in the context of Robert Johnson’s non-neural body. One might give further substance to (I’m tempted to say ‘flesh out’) this idea by claiming that being in a particular body will give rise to idiosyncratic psychological schemata or heuristics, and thus to instructions that will most likely fail to be implemented correctly in a different body. However, if we respond to the intimate character of the relation between the neural and the non-neural bodily contributions here without assuming a neuro-centric perspective at the outset, there seems to be no good reason to think of the implicated muscles and joints as merely decoding messages sent by the brain, as opposed to being integral parts of the psychological processing concerned (ibid.: 226). If that’s right, then one can no longer think of tracks such as ‘Preaching Blues’ or ‘If I had Possession over Judgement Day’ as being pre-formed (in all their essential aspects) in the brain, and simply poised to burst out into the world via the non-neural body. The non-neural body is a proper part of the creative psychological machinery in play.

Embedded creativity The embedded cognition perspective seeks to register the important, and sometimes necessary, causal contributions made by environmental elements (paradigmatically, external technology) to many cognitive outcomes. More precisely, according to the embedded view, the distinctive adaptive richness and/or flexibility of intelligent thought and action is regularly, and perhaps sometimes necessarily, causally dependent on the bodily exploitation of certain environmental props or scaffolds. Despite the fact of this dependence, however, the embedded theorist continues to hold that the actual thinking going on in such cases remains a resolutely skin-side phenomenon, being either brain-bound or (on a less common, more radical iteration of the view) distributed through the brain and the non-neural body. In short, the embedded theorist seeks to understand the ways in which brain-bound, or perhaps body-bound, thought is routinely given a performance boost by its external (technological) ecology.6 One’s first reaction here might be that it is simply obvious that creative cognition involves environmental scaffolding and so will qualify as embedded. After all, part of the aesthetic power of Gustave Courbet’s oil paintings may surely be traced to the tactile surfaces he produced by the thick layering of paint; The Byrds’ reworking of Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man might have sounded significantly less interesting if Roger McGuinn had played it on anything other than a Rickenbacker twelve-string guitar. But this would be to set the bar for embeddedness too low. For there is in truth a genuine, although

240  Michael Wheeler no doubt fuzzy, difference between the kinds of external causal contribution that will attract the attention of the embedded theorist and those that won’t. To reveal this difference, we can begin with a distinction made by Boden and Edmonds (2009). In what is sometimes called ‘computer-assisted art’, the computer functions ‘merely as a tool that remains under the close direction of the artist, rather like an extra paintbrush or a sharper chisel’ (ibid.: 137). Such cases are to be contrasted with certain other human-computer creative couplings, such as those operative in computer-based generative art, a genre in which the visual artwork is produced, in part, by sets of abstract rules that are implemented, by a computer, in a manner which is not under the artist’s direct control. In these more interesting cases, the computer is illuminatingly described as being ‘partly responsible for coming up with the idea itself ’ (ibid.: 138). Both computer-assisted art and computer-based generative art manifestly involve causal contributions from an external technological element, namely the computer. However, in computer-assisted art, the computer is naturally conceived in line with the orthodox neuro-centric model, that is, as no more than a fancy tool (a sharper chisel) for implementing instructions formed in the artist’s head, instructions that specify the essential features of the artwork. In computer-based generative art, however, the computer makes a more fundamental causal contribution, by accounting for some of the distinctively creative aspects of the work. This is the ­creativity-specific analogue of accounting for the adaptive richness and flexibility of intelligent thought and action, as mentioned in the generic definition of embedded cognition given earlier. So, unlike computer-assisted art, computer-based generative art is an example of embedded creativity. Now, however, we need to make sure that the bar for embeddedness hasn’t been set too high. Lurking in Boden and Edmonds’ phrase ‘partly responsible for coming up with the idea itself ’ is an implication that, in computer-based generative art, the computer is, in some way, a locus of its own agency or intelligence. But an external technological element may account for some of the distinctively creative aspects of an artwork, and thus figure in an event of embedded creativity, without exhibiting its own agency or intelligence. Consider Byrne’s autobiographical account of how he wrote the lyrics for albums such as Talking Heads’ Remain in Light. Starting with pre-existing instrumental tracks and fragments of melody, Byrne churned out pages and pages of semantically arbitrary (often nonsense) words and phrases whose syllables (he judged) ‘worked with’ the music. Then he scanned the pages for groups of words that hinted at a subject matter, and he finished off the song from there. As Byrne (2012: 199) describes this process: ‘The lyrics may have begun as gibberish, but often, though not always, a “story” in the broadest sense emerges. Emergent storytelling, one might say.’ In harmony with an embedded inside-andoutside logic, the final form of the created product here (the lyrics, with

Talking about more than heads  241 their full ‘storytelling’ aspect) emerges from a dynamic i­nteractive relationship between an external resource (the pre-existing instrumental music) and the artist’s internal psychological processing (Byrne’s inner linguistic capacities), a relationship in which the external resource genuinely accounts for some of the distinctively creative aspects of the artwork, and thus is revealed to be, in a deflated sense at least, a partner or participant in the creative process. A more telling example of embedded creativity occurs during Byrne’s brief history of Western classical music as a succession of adaptations to different environmental niches (ibid.: 16–21). This is the moment where, by Byrne’s own admission, his official model of creativity struggles to cope with the data. However, although the case in question escapes Byrne’s own official model, it is, I shall argue, revealingly understood using a key concept from the embedded cognition literature. According to Byrne, the fact that Western music in the middle ages was standardly performed in huge stone-walled gothic cathedrals with long reverberation times explains why such music evolved to feature modal structures characterized by very long notes: such music minimizes the risk of overlaps and clashes that is present in that particular sonic environment. By the late 1700s, things had changed. Mozart was performing his compositions in grand, but not gigantic, rooms populated by plenty of people in extravagant dress. This different sonic environment deadened the sound and allowed elaborate details in the music to be heard. Mozart composed his music accordingly. He also made his orchestra larger, so that the sound produced could be heard over the noise of the people dancing and talking. And so on. Byrne’s official model of creativity as adaptive fit to pre-existing formats copes comfortably with historical example after historical example. But then along comes Wagner, and the model falters (ibid.: 19–20). In the eighteen-seventies, Wagner had the Bayreuth Festival Theatre built to support a music that he had only hitherto imagined, a more bombastic, dramatic music. His architectural innovation was to introduce a bigger orchestra area that could accommodate more musicians (especially in the bass section) and larger brass instruments. In other words, as Byrne depicts this historical event, with the design of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre, Wagner did not create musical artworks to fit a pre-existing format. Rather, he created a format with a certain kind of music in mind, and then produced the music, most notably Parsifal, to fit it.7 This is, I suggest, a creativity-oriented version of a process that embedded cognition theorists know and love, one that Andy Clark has dubbed cognitive niche construction (e.g. Clark 2008; see also Wheeler and Clark 2008). Niche construction (e.g. Laland et al. 2000) is a recognized biological phenomenon in which animals act on their environments and in so doing modify the selection pressures that shape the subsequent path of

242  Michael Wheeler biological evolution. Thus, in a widely cited example, beavers collectively build dams that alter the ways in which rivers flow. These created structures become part of the selective environment in which beaver populations evolve, since future generations of beavers inherit (non-genetically, cf. cultural transmission) both the dams and the altered river flows that they produce. Cognitive niche construction is the specifically psychological, and sometimes intra-lifetime, version of this generic biological phenomenon, a version in which human beings build external structures that, often in combination with culturally transmitted practices, transform problem spaces in ways that promote (or sometimes obstruct) thinking and reasoning (Clark 2008; see also Wheeler and Clark 2008). To bring cognitive niche construction into view, I shall re-use a compelling example that Clark sources from Beach (1988). Consider the way in which a skilled bartender may achieve the successful delivery of a large and complex order of drinks. Fulfilling such an order can strike the casual observer as a relatively daunting task, especially if the memory-relevant resources available to the bartender are thought to be restricted to inner storage and recall. However, it is a fortuitous fact that different kinds of drink often come in differently shaped glasses (think of cocktails). The ecology of the bar is thus characterized by some relatively persistent physical structures (the differently shaped glasses), plus some culturally established norms (the specificity of kind of drink to shape of glass). What novice bartenders learn to do, under the tutelage of their experienced colleagues, is to retrieve the correct glass for each drink as it is requested, and to arrange the differently shaped glasses in a spatial sequence that tracks the temporal sequence of the drinks order. From the perspective of the purely organic cognitive resources available, what the bartender has learnt to do, in replicating this culturally transmitted practice, is to exploit her physical environment in order to outsource complexity and so reduce the burden on inner processing. In effect, she transforms what might have been a highly challenging memory task into a simpler (roughly) perception and association task. The bartender’s practice is a case of cognitive niche construction, and a compelling example of the kind of coupled partnership between inner neural resources, embodied actions and designed environmental structures on which advocates of the embedded cognition perspective get to dine out. And while Wagner’s theatre-building adventure may indeed escape Byrne’s official model of creativity, it is, I submit, another powerful illustration of embedded cognition and, more specifically, of cognitive niche construction. The constructed cognitive niche of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre enabled a certain kind of creative musical thinking, and thus a distinctive created product, in this case a new, surprising and history-changing species of opera.

Talking about more than heads  243

Extended creativity Advocates of extended cognition hold that the physical machinery of mind sometimes extends beyond the skull and skin. More precisely, according to the hypothesis of extended cognition, there are actual (in this world) cases of intelligent thought and action, in which the material vehicles that realize the thinking and thoughts concerned are spatially distributed over brain, body and world, in such a way that certain external (here meaning ‘beyond-the-skull-and-skin’) factors are rightly accorded fundamentally the same cognitive status as would ordinarily be accorded to a subset of your neurons. So, to be clear, ‘extension’ here has the sense of spatial (environment-encompassing) extension, not performance enhancement, although, in some cases of (spatially) extended cognition, psychological performance will indeed be enhanced. Eye-catching examples of external elements that advocates of extended cognition often take to have such cognitive status include smartphones, tablets and at least some instances of wearable computing, but, in the end, less attention-grabbing items such as notebooks (the old-fashioned kind), tally sticks and abacuses would, under the right circumstances, do just as well.8 Given that the embedded perspective already presents itself as doing justice to the significant contribution made by environmental elements to thought and action, one might wonder how the transition from embedded cognition to extended cognition is supposed to happen. This is a complicated and contested issue, a proper treatment of which would take us too far afield, so we will have to make do with a (very) brief statement of the general shape of my own favoured approach (for the arguments and details, see e.g. Wheeler 2011, 2013). What is needed, it seems, is an account of precisely which causal contributions to thought and action count as cognitive contributions and which don’t. For my own part, I see no way of meeting this demand, except by appeal to what Adams and Aizawa (2008), two thinkers who are in fact front-line opponents of the extended cognition view, have dubbed a mark of the cognitive. A mark of the cognitive is a scientifically informed account of what it is to be a proper part of a cognitive system that, so as not to beg any crucial questions, is independent of where any candidate element happens to be spatially located. Once a candidate mark of the cognitive has been placed on the table, further philosophical and empirical leg-work will be required to find out (i) whether that account is independently plausible, and (ii) just where cognition (so conceived) falls – in the brain (as the neuro-centrist and some embedded theorists think), in the brain and the non-neural body (as the embodied cognition theorist and some other embedded theorists think), or, as the fan of extended cognition predicts will sometimes be the case, in a system that is spatially distributed across brain, body and world.

244  Michael Wheeler In principle, then, one might identify an external causal contribution to psychological performance – a generative art program, say – that, by one mark of the cognitive, counts as cognitive, and thus as part of an extended mind, but which, by an alternative mark of the cognitive, fails to count as cognitive, and so forms part of an embedded story. We would then need to decide which mark of the cognitive is better. So, what is the mark of a creative cognitive process? Clearly, this question could be the spark for a wide-ranging discussion in the philosophy and psychology of creativity. In what follows, however, I shall simply select an independently plausible candidate for such a mark and ask whether the psychological process thereby picked out is an extended one. This will be sufficient to illuminate the general shape of the debate that concerns us here. Matthew Elton (1994, 1995) has argued that a genuinely creative process may be distinguished (conceptually, at least) into two distinct phases: generation (subsuming the preparation and the incubation of the idea) and evaluation.9 Regarding the latter, one might gloss Elton’s account as incorporating, within the creative process itself, a sensitivity to something like Boden’s notion of the value of a product (see above). Importantly, for Elton, while the generation phase of the creative cognitive process may involve the kind of structured rule-governed routines that characterize something like computer-based generative art, it need not. Elton’s evidence here comes partly from the work of the experimental musician and composer Brian Eno. Eno regularly introduces chance and unpredictability into the generation phase of creation, including (a) the deliberate use of a model of synthesizer (the Yamaha DX7) known to have an erratic oscillator, and (b) the random selection of playing cards featuring so-called ‘oblique strategies’ (cryptic pieces of advice that need to be interpreted in ways that apply to the present situation), at moments when other creative processes stall (Elton 1994: 213). Crucially, though, Eno’s assessment phase is highly controlled. Indeed, he claims to produce a hundred times the amount of music he actually releases (ibid.: 213). Something like this Eno-style asymmetry between generation and evaluation also characterizes evolutionary computer art, a genre in which computational algorithms inspired by Darwinian evolution are used to produce artworks (for discussion and examples, see Boden and Edmonds 2009: 143–4). Very roughly speaking, the evolutionary computer artist proceeds as follows. First, she sets up a way of encoding artworks as genotypes. Then, she generates a random population of genotypes that are subsequently decoded to produce what is, in effect, a random population of artworks. An evaluation phase then results in some of these artworks being selected as ‘parents’ for the next generation. Genetic operators analogous to recombination and mutation in natural reproduction are applied to the parental genotypes to produce offspring artworks. The resulting new

Talking about more than heads  245 population is then evaluated and a new batch of parents is selected. And so on. Over successive generations, artworks are discovered that come to reflect whatever aesthetic criteria are at work (often in an implicit or intuitive way) during the evaluation phase. Now notice that the two preceding creative scenarios, in which there is an asymmetry between generation and evaluation, are also characterized by a distinctive division of labour between the human beings and the technology involved: Eno always evaluates the products generated by his unreliable oscillators and his randomly selected oblique strategy cards, and, typically, the evaluative selection of parent artworks in evolutionary computer art is carried out by the artist, or by other human beings such as the visitors to a gallery. I say ‘typically’ because there are examples of fully automated evolutionary computer art in which the evaluation is carried out algorithmically using a ‘fitness function.’ However, the scope of such algorithmic aesthetic judgments may be limited. As remarked above, aesthetic evaluation involves aesthetic values and, as Boden (2004: 10) notes, these are difficult to recognize, put into words or state clearly. Moreover, they are culturally variable, contested (even within cultures) and change over time. Striking a similar note, Elton (1994, 1995) describes aesthetic evaluation in terms of a culturally conditioned, changing, basic aesthetic that can’t be articulated explicitly. So, you may ask yourself, could full-blooded, human-like aesthetic evaluation ever be realized in external technology? This question is one that Boden and Elton each raise in relation to artificial creativity, that is, in relation to the debate over whether any ‘mere’ machine, such as a computer, could ever be creative, or at least appear to be creative. However, it is relevant to extended creativity too, because it promises to provide part of an argument by which someone who is nervous of the metaphysical consequences of extended cognition might try to relegate, to the status of ‘mere’ scaffolding, even those external factors that make significant causal contributions to the generation of created products. If this conclusion holds, then creativity is ‘at best’ an embedded, rather than an extended, psychological phenomenon. Here’s how such an argument might go. Against the hypothesis of extended cognition in general, Butler (1998: 205) argues that the phenomena of control and choosing provide what he calls the ‘mark of a truly cognitive system.’ Furthermore, according to Butler, this sort of executive control of thought and action – the mark of the truly cognitive – happens only in brains, which should make us resistant to counting any of the external causal contributions involved as genuinely cognitive. It seems that a Butler-style argument might be constructed in the vicinity of creativity, as we are conceiving of it at present, that is, in terms of generation and evaluation. First, recall Eno: it is at least plausible that we treat Eno himself as creative, despite the fact that he out-sources

246  Michael Wheeler certain generative processes to external technology, precisely because he continues to be the site of the evaluative decision-making. Perhaps this suggests that evaluation is the mark of a truly creative cognitive system. Now plug in the reflections on evaluation by Boden and Elton. They provide some support for the claim that, in the case of artistic creativity at least, evaluation (the executive control of creation, as we might now say) cannot be realized in external technological elements. But if truly creative cognition happens just where evaluation happens, and if aesthetic evaluation is brain-bound, then maybe, in the spirit of Butler, we should be resistant to the idea of extended creative cognition, at least in the case of art. (Note: Henceforth I shall suppress the step of limiting this objection to the domain of artistic creativity. Although, given what I’ve said, this step is strictly correct, it strikes me as plausible that the considerations which, according to Boden and Elton, prevent the algorithmic specification of aesthetic values – e.g. resistance to explicit articulation, cultural variability – will apply to many other kinds of creation-related evaluation.) Whatever initial attractiveness the Butler-style argument against extended creative cognition may possess, it has a seriously unpalatable consequence and so should be rejected. In shrinking the truly creative part of cognition down to just evaluation, the argument is committed to dismissing, as non-creative, any other processes that are implicated in the generation of the forms that are subsequently evaluated, whatever those processes may be (rule-governed manipulations, pattern completion, perceptual sensitivity, imagery, analogical reasoning and so on) and wherever they are located (in the brain or in external technology). This move surely lacks independent plausibility, since where such processes occur in the brain during a creative event, we would standardly count them as part of the creative cognition that’s going on. To withdraw that judgment solely on grounds of externality would be to beg the question against the extended view.10 But without the shrinking move in place, the Butler-style critique provides no barrier to the claim that creative cognition is extended. After all, there is nothing on the table to suggest that at least some of the generative processes in the frame couldn’t be externally realized within a distributed path of creation, and we have seen positive evidence that some of them (e.g. rule-governed manipulations) could be. Notice that it would do no good for our Butler-style critic to revise her position by claiming (a) that it is evaluation plus the choosing of the generation mechanisms that co-constitute the executive control of creation, and (b) that evaluation and generative-mechanism-choosing are both brainbound. Any such adjustment will succumb to a response with the same structure as the one I offered previously. For the revised objection to be an argument against extended creativity, the truly creative part of cognition must be shrunk down to just evaluation plus selection. But that means that all the other processes implicated in the generation of the forms that

Talking about more than heads  247 are subsequently evaluated will be rendered non-creative, whatever those processes may be, and wherever they occur. As we have seen, this position lacks independent plausibility. Creative cognition, it seems, may sometimes be extended, and not ‘merely’ embedded.

Conclusion: the path of creation (again) On a track called ‘Life is Long’ (written, as it happens, with Brian Eno), David Byrne sings the line ‘I can barely see cos my head’s in the way.’ That’s (almost) the message of this chapter. We can barely see the cognitive mechanisms underpinning creativity because our heads are in the way. Once this cranial obstruction is fully removed, the path of creation is revealed to be routinely constituted by dynamic arrays of body-involving and environment-involving processing loops. In other words, the creative mind is embodied, embedded and extended.

Acknowledgments For useful comments on an earlier version of this paper, thanks to Matthew Elton, Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran. For critical feedback on the ideas presented in talk form, thanks to audiences in Cambridge, San Antonio and Stirling. Finally, special thanks to Matthew Elton for buying me a copy of How Music Works.

Notes 1 For the uninitiated, Talking Heads was a New York-based band active between 1975 and 1991. Their music might be described as located somewhere between new wave and art-pop, although that hardly begins to do justice to the eclectic palette of influences that shaped their body of work. Byrne has since pursued a solo musical career and has produced artworks in other media such as film, photography and fiction. He has collaborated with a wide range of musicians and artists, including, perhaps most notably, Brian Eno. Although, formally speaking, Byrne is not a card-carrying academic theorist of creativity, How Music Works rewards being read in precisely that spirit. 2 The romantic/conventional understanding of creativity chimes with certain prominent accounts of creativity – and especially of artistic creativity – in the history of philosophy. Consider, for example, Collingwood’s (1938) notion of artworks as imaginary things. According to Collingwood, in the case of art, the physically realized created product is related only contingently to the artwork proper, with the latter existing in the mind of its creator, even though the weakness of the human imagination means that sensory loops through the environment may sometimes provide assistance during the creative process.A similar theoretical structure may be found in Croce’s (1909/1922) account of artworks in terms of internal intuitions that, as a matter of only contingent fact, sometimes require physical realizations in order to be remembered or communicated. 3 Eagle-eyed readers will be itching to point out that Byrne describes the path of creation (as he understands it) as being almost 180° from the romantic model, which is not quite a reversal. It is hard to know what significance one should attach to this qualification, but I am inclined to hear it as a recognition that the notion of ‘creation as fit’ can’t be quite right, or at least that it isn’t the whole story. Later in this chapter, we will see that Byrne explicitly highlights an important shortcoming of his own model.

248  Michael Wheeler 4 For some of the seminal research, see e.g. Kirby (2002); Smith et al. (2003). For a summary of more recent work that extends the research beyond computer simulations to include laboratory experiments with real people, see Kirby et al. (2015). 5 Kirby and colleagues appeal to cultural evolution to provide a scientifically credible, non-metaphorical account of how, over historical time, human natural languages come to have the compositional structure that they do. However, if, as I suggest in the main text, this opens the door to the proposition that the Byrne-style cultural–evolutionary model of creativity is similarly scientifically credible and non-metaphorical, then since creativity happens not only in visual art and music, but also in language, there is another language-related upshot, namely that one would be able to generate a cultural–evolutionary account of linguistic creativity.Thanks to Berys Gaut for alerting me to this consequence. 6 The case for embedded cognition has been made repeatedly. An influential philosophical treatment may be found in Clark (1997). For my own analysis, see e.g. Wheeler (2005, 2013). 7 ‘Wagner first conceived [Parsifal] in April 1857 but did not finish it until twenty-five years later. It was Wagner’s last completed opera and in composing it he took advantage of the particular acoustics of his Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Parsifal was first produced at the second Bayreuth Festival in 1882. The Bayreuth Festival maintained a monopoly on Parsifal productions until 1903, when the opera was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Parsifal, last accessed 15/02/2017. 8 The case for extended cognition was originally made by Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998); see also Clark (2008). For a more recent collection that places the original Clark and Chalmers paper alongside a range of developments, criticisms and defences of the view, see Menary (2010). 9 There are similarities between Elton’s model and other accounts of creative cognition in the literature. For example, according to the Geneplore model (e.g.Ward et al. 1999), the creative psychological process may be divided into the two phases of generation and exploration, where the former corresponds closely to Elton’s notion of generation and the latter overlaps with his notion of evaluation. 10 Clark (2008: 160) pursues a similar kind of objection to Butler, as part of the general debate over extended cognition.

References Adams, F. and Aizawa, K. (2008) The Bounds of Cognition, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Beach, K. (1988) “The Role of External Mnemonic Symbols in Acquiring an Occupation,” in M. M. Gruneberg and R. N. Sykes (eds.) Practical Aspects of Memory, New York: Wiley. Boden, M. A. (1990) The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (first edition), London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Boden, M. A. (2004) The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (second edition), London and New York: Routledge. Boden, M. A. (2010) Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boden, M. A. and Edmonds, E. A. (2009) “What is Generative Art?” Digital Creativity vol. 20, nos. 1–2, pp. 21–46. Reprinted as chapter 7 of (Boden 2010), from which page numbers are taken. Butler, K. (1998) Internal Affairs: A Critique of Externalism in the Philosophy of Mind, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Byrne, D. (2012) How Music Works, Edinburgh: Canongate. Chomsky, N. A. (1986) Knowledge of Language, New York: Praeger.

Talking about more than heads  249 Clark, A. (1997) Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark, A. (2008) Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. New York: Oxford University Press. Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. (1998) “The Extended Mind,” Analysis vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 7–19 Collingwood, R. G. (1938) The Principles of Art. London: Oxford University Press. Croce, B. (1909/1922) Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, translated by D. Ainslie, New York: Noonday. Elton, M. (1994) “Towards Artificial Creativity,” Languages of Design vol. 2, pp. 207–22. Elton, M. (1995) “Artificial Creativity: Enculturing Computers,” Leonardo vol. 28, no.3, pp. 207–13. Haugeland, J. (1998) “Mind Embodied and Embedded,” in Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kirby, S. (2002) “Learning, Bottlenecks and the Evolution of Recursive Syntax,” in E. Briscoe (ed.), Linguistic Evolution Through Language Acquisition: Formal and Computational Models, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirby, S., Tamariz, M., Cornish, H. and Smith, K. (2015) “Compression and Communication in the Cultural Evolution of Linguistic Structure,” Cognition vol. 141, pp. 87–102. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laland, K. N., Odling-Smee, J. and Feldman, M. W. (2000) “Niche Construction, Biological Evolution and Cultural Change,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 31–146. Menary, R. (ed.) (2010) The Extended Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nelson, R. (2002) “Evolutionary Theorising in Economics,” in M. Wheeler, J. Ziman and M. A. Boden (eds.), The Evolution of Cultural Entities, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Noë, A. (2004) Action in Perception, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith, K., Kirby, S. and Brighton, H. (2003) “Iterated Learning: A Framework for the Emergence of Language,” Artificial Life vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 371–386. van Fraassen, B. (1980) The Scientific Image, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ward, T. B., Smith, S.M. and Finke, R. A. (1999) “Creative Cognition,” In R. J. Sternberg (ed.), Handbook of Creativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheeler, M. (2005) Reconstructing The Cognitive World: The Next Step, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wheeler, M. (2011) “Embodied Cognition and the Extended Mind,” in J. Garvey (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Philosophy of Mind, London: Continuum. Wheeler, M. (2013) “Is Cognition Embedded or Extended? The Case of Gestures,” in Z. Radman (ed.), The Hand, an Organ of the Mind: What the Manual tells the Mental, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

250  Michael Wheeler Wheeler, M. and Clark, A. (2008) “Culture, Embodiment and Genes: Unravelling the Triple Helix,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series B vol. 363, pp. 3563–75. Ziman, J. (ed.) (2000) Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

15 The social conditions for sustainable technological innovation Stephen Davies

We are used to technological progress. Something is invented. It is ­developed and refined; that is, it gets cheaper, smaller, more efficient, for example. This happens until, in time, a better replacement technology sweeps it aside. The valve gives way to the transistor, which later is superseded by the microchip. Tomasello (1999) outlines the “ratchet effect” by which this occurs: cumulative cultural evolution depends on creative invention and faithful social transmission, and these in turn require a distinctive suite of cognitive skills, such as imitative learning. “Human cognitive ontogeny takes place in an environment of ever-new artifacts and social practices which, at any one time, represent something resembling the entire collective wisdom of the entire social group throughout its entire cultural history” (1999:7). This pattern of development does not apply to every technology. Simple ones might be fairly stable for hundreds of years; think of chopsticks. Vested interests can inhibit improvements or replacements, as with the internal combustion engine. Nevertheless, cumulative positive change is the norm. It was not always so. For most of our species’ 200,000-year history, technological innovations were sporadic and fragile. They might flourish for a time, even for thousands of years, only to disappear. That process is the subject of this chapter, in which I review current thought on these questions: What background social conditions make for the invention, preservation, and propagation of technology? What alternative conditions lead to loss and regression? As a case study, let us begin with the Tasmanians.

Tasmania Homo sapiens reached the greater Australian continent, which involved multiple sea crossing including one of about 80 or more kilometers (50 miles) (O’Connell and Allen, J. 2007) at least 40,000 years ago (40 ka), possibly earlier.1 Sahul Land, as this continent is sometimes called, included Papua New Guinea in the north and what is now Tasmania in the south, the seas being some 100 meters (300 feet) lower than today (Wells 2002).

252  Stephen Davies The southern reaches of the continent were occupied about 40-22 ka (Diamond 1978; Henrich 2004; Stringer 2012). The people living there were cut off by rising seas on what became the island of Tasmania about 14 ka. Progressively over the following millennia, spear-throwers, fishing spears, barbed spears, boomerangs, nets, hafted tools, and bone tools (including fish hooks) disappeared from their arsenal, as well as cold-weather clothes (Diamond 1978; Henrich 2004; Stringer 2012). For instance, bone tools go back at least 18 ka in the Tasmanian archaeological record, but they began to decline from 8 ka and disappeared by 3 ka, and whereas Tasmanians formerly relied heavily on fish, by 3.8 ka fish bones fade from the scene. By the time they encountered European settlers and convicts at the start of the nineteenth century, the Tasmanian aborigines had the simplest technology of any modern humans. What was the cause of this technological regression? Diamond (1978) implies that it was the result of cultural drift—that is, random cultural change—in a small population. The population of Tasmanian aborigines at the time of contact with Europeans in about 1803 was approximately 4,000 (Henrich 2004). According to Henrich, “imperfect imitation, experiments, errors, bad memories and ill fortune” (2004:200) conspire against successful transmission and, anyway, most learners attain skills lower than those of the experts they emulate. According to a mathematical model he develops, the low number of social learners created a situation that “(1) kept stable or even improved simple technologies, and (2) produced an increasing deterioration in more complex skills” (2004:197). To put it simply, the loss of knowledge outweighed the development and transmission of innovative ideas. Meanwhile, product quality declined with each generation. There is no reason to think that the Tasmanians were less intelligent or resourceful than their mainland cousins, who kept the technologies the islanders lost. By an accident of circumstances, the Tasmanians fell below a crucial threshold, one that would have allowed them to keep transgenerational knowledge alive in their oral community. With writing, libraries, electronic storage, and the like, we save and transmit our knowledge and skills without relying on close personal contact with a pool of other technologists. By contrast, the Tasmanians were condemned by their isolation and small numbers to lose much of their material culture.

Middle Stone Age cases Henrich observes that “persistent technological losses among partially isolated cultural groups are substantially more common than is typically recognized” (2004:208). As evidence he cites canoes, bows and arrows, and pottery, across the various island groups of Oceania. Like the Tasmanian

Conditions for sustainable innovation  253 example, these involve small groups isolated by ocean expanses. As well, they all occurred in the Holocene, that is, within the last 9,000 years. But we can imagine similar forces operating much earlier in our species’ history. Indeed, there are some important precedents in need of explanation. Two lithic industries—that is, traditions of working stone and the toolkit thus produced—emerged in southern Africa in the Middle Stone Age (MSA) (McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Henshilwood 2007; McBrearty 2007; Mellars 2007; Powell, Shennan and Thomas 2009). The first, known as Still Bay, appeared about 75 ka and the second, Howiesons Poort, about 70 ka.2 Both involved sophisticated heat treatments to alter the flaking properties of the stone involved. The Howiesons Poort industry replaced the Still Bay industry at Klasies River Mouth and Diepkloof rock shelter in the South African cape and is further represented at other South African coastal sites—Blombos cave, Border cave, and Sibudu—as well as Apollo 11 cave in Namibia. In addition to symmetrical stone blades, awls, and scrapers, there were multipart and bone-tipped tools and weapons, some with abstract engravings. Associated at these sites (though varying in their prominence from place to place) were collections of ochre, including ochre incised with patterns, engraved ostrich shells, and perforated marine shells that would have been used as personal ornaments. (There are thousands of ochre crayons at Blombos cave and hundreds of engraved ostrich shell fragments at Diepkloof rock shelter.) Meanwhile the bow and arrow were in use at these sites at least 20,000 years before they appeared elsewhere (McBrearty 2007; Lombard and Phillipson 2010; Lombard and Haidle 2012). This complex of technologies had been identified by paleoarchaeologists as markers of behavioral modernity, which includes the kind of abstract, symbolic, and imaginative thinking that now characterizes our species. It was once thought that behavioral modernity emerged in Cro-Magnon sapiens abruptly about 35 ka in Europe. (This was the majority view in Mellars and Stringer 1989.) And some people theorized that this represented a change to the human mind as a result of a modification to the operation of the brain. (Different accounts of what this brain alteration might have been are discussed in Nowell 2010.) As many of those who have considered the MSA evidence have more recently observed, however, it counts decisively against both the abruptness and the Euro-centeredness of the arrival of the modern mind.3 The preferred view now is that demographic factors, rather than changes in cognitive capacity, can explain geographic variation in the timing of appearances of modern behavior. We need not pursue the ongoing controversies about behavioral modernity in our species, however. For us, the relevant point is that both these industries came to an end. The collecting (but not inscribing) of ochre goes back as far as 285 ka in Africa (McBrearty 2007) and by Neanderthals

254  Stephen Davies in Europe to 250–200 ka (Roebroeks et al. 2012). That practice continued after 60 ka. But all the “modern” technologies associated with the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort industries disappeared. They were replaced by older MSA industries, perhaps wielded by different communities (Mellars 2007; Jacobs and Roberts 2009; Stringer 2012). This replacement of “modern” technologies with older, simpler, and more conservative ones resembles the Tasmanian case. Moreover, millennia passed before the “modern” technologies recurred. For instance, “around 40 ka, [shell and stone] beads reappear almost simultaneously in both Africa and the Near East and for the first time in Europe and Asia.” (d’Errico et al. 2009:16051).

Rare, even earlier examples Remarkable though they were for their time, the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort industries were themselves anticipated at earlier times. Barbed bone points and other bone tools from Katanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, are dated to 90 ka (d’Errico et al 2003; Marwick 2003; Powell, Shennan, and Thomas 2009). Other bone points from India and Java may be of similar antiquity (Henshilwood 2007; Bednarik 2013). But the earliest bone tools, at 1.8–1 million years ago, long pre-date our species, as do the earliest hafted tools at 400 ka (d’Errico et al. 2003) and composite (multipart) tools at 285 ka (McBrearty 2007). Meanwhile, the practice of heating stone to alter its flaking properties was anticipated at Pinnacle Cave in South Africa at 164 ka (Marean et al. 2007). More intriguing, perhaps, are “symbolic” behaviors: abstract pictures or representational depictions, personal ornaments, ritual behaviors, and burial, especially with grave goods. These too had isolated precursors. Personal ornaments in the form of beads, shells, and animal teeth have a long history. I have already mentioned MSA cases of incised ochre and engraved ostrich shells. Older perforated shells, dated to 135–90 ka, have been found at a number of north African and Levantine sites, including burials (Vanhaeren et al. 2006; d’Errico and Vanhaeren 2007; McBrearty 2007; Pettitt 2011a). And a perforated Conus shell associated with infant burial at Border Cave dated to 80 ka (Pettitt 2011a). At Rhino Cave, Botswana, archaeologists have uncovered many points made from colorful, non-local stones and dated to 70 ka. These were elaborately and carefully made and, without leaving the cave of manufacture, were then burned and destroyed. This is interpreted as evidence of ritual behavior (Coulson, Staurset, and Walker 2011). Meanwhile, the treatment of corpses in burials (such as defleshing, but not involving cannibalism), grave goods (such as ornaments or parts of animals), and the addition of ochre to graves are all associated with psychological modernity, being common in the Upper Paleolithic after

Conditions for sustainable innovation  255 30 ka. (The treatment of all of these as “symbolic” and as equally so is ­problematic, of course: Henshilwood and Marean 2003; Pettitt 2011b.) Though burials prior to this time are comparatively rare, one or more of these characteristics usually is present. And this applies even to some very old burials of early humans with robust rather than fully gracile facial features (McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Caspari and Wolpoff 2013)—in graves at Herto, Ethiopia, dated 160–150 ka, in multiple inhumations at Skhūl, Israel, dated 130–100 ka, and at Qafzeh, Israel, dated to 100-90 ka (Mellars 2007; Henshilwood 2007; Pettitt 2011a). As it happens, there is evidence of similar behaviors in other hominin species, though these were apparently not widespread. Indeed, there are grounds to think that Neanderthals used shells as ornaments or ritual objects prior to the arrival of our species in Europe (Zilhão et al. 2010; Cook 2013). And they removed large feathers from birds of prey they killed, which is again thought to demonstrate ritualistic behavior (Peresani 2011; Finlayson et al. 2012). A remarkable case is that of a necklace of interlocking eagle talons dating to 120 ka, which is 80,000 years before our species encountered them (Radovčić et al. 2015). They also collected and carried crystal, fossils, and oddly shaped stones over distance (Mellars 1996), as well as ochre (Roebroeks, et al. 2012).4 Neanderthals also occasionally buried their dead (McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Renfrew 2009; Pettit 2011a).5 Evidence of funerary caching goes back to 240 ka, but most burials are in the period 70–34 ka (Pettitt 2011a; Cook 2013); that is, mainly prior to their encounter with Cro-Magnon sapiens, but in the latter phase of their existence. Pettitt (2011a) concludes that at least some transmission of mortuary tradition occurred among some Neanderthal groups, though grave goods were only rarely involved. Others (d’Errico et al. 2003) maintain that there was an organized and very ancient funerary tradition among Near Eastern and European Neanderthals. Still, it is frequently held that Homo sapiens is the only species to make art. The oldest known European sapiens cave art is in Chauvet Cave, France, and dates from 35 ka (Clottes, Bahn, and Arnold 2003; Lawson 2012). Hand stencils and figurative animal pictures of the same age or older are found in seven cave sites in the Maros karsts of Sulawesi, Indonesia (Aubert et al. 2014) and animal pictures on stone slabs in Apollo 11 Cave, Namibia, may be older (McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Zilhão 2007). But the exclusiveness of art to Homo sapiens also has been challenged (d’Errico and Vanhaeren 2007; Zilhão et al. 2010; Zilhão 2011) and no consensus has emerged. In part, it depends on whether one thinks ochre-painted shells qualify as art when compared to the paintings of Chauvet. Some recent findings are more persuasive, however. The first known example of an abstract pattern engraved by Neanderthals, from Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar, consists of a deeply impressed cross-hatching carved into the

256  Stephen Davies bedrock of the cave that has remained covered by an undisturbed ­archaeological level containing Mousterian artifacts made by Neanderthals (Rodríguez 2014). Dated at 39 ka, it is unlikely to have been influenced by Homo sapiens’ image making. And hand stencils in El Castillo cave, Spain, have been dated to at least 40.8 ka and attributed to Neanderthals (Garcia-Diez et al. 2015). The most extraordinary precursor of “modern” “artistic” behavior is a shell with a geometric engraving sourced from Trinil, Java, Indonesia. The piece is attributed to Homo erectus, a much earlier emigrant from Africa. Indeed, Trinil is the site where the first specimen of Homo erectus, popularly known as Java Man, was found in 1891. The engraved shell dates to half a million years ago (550–425 ka). As the scientists who reported on this said, “the manufacture of geometric engravings is generally interpreted as indicative of modern cognition and behaviour. Key questions in the debate on the origin of such behaviour are whether this innovation is restricted to Homo sapiens, and whether it has a uniquely African origin” ( Joordens et al. 2015:228). They answer both questions in the negative.

So, what happened? If we agree that “modern” behaviors did not arrive abruptly but were probably frequently anticipated, often scores of thousands of years before they became permanently established from 35 ka, and if we note also that these anticipations were not always short-lived and fluky, but persisted in the Middle Stone Age over many millennia before they were again lost, then there is no reason to invoke a sudden change to the working of the brain as explaining them. A more likely explanation, both for their persistence and for their loss, will take into account the environments, physical and cultural, in which the events occurred.6 And that is why the comparison with the Tasmanian case is apt. This is how Stringer reasons: “What happened in Tasmania may help explain events in Africa more than 50,000 years earlier. … [S]mall populations would have been prone to population crashes and even to extinction, or forced into relatively rapid movement or adaptation to survive, and this could have led to the regular loss of innovations that might have been useful in the longer term. Thus repeated ‘bottlenecking’ did not just remove genes but also eradicated discoveries and inventions associated with the human populations concerned, and rapid environmental change or population movements would have had the same effect” (2012:221–2). He goes on to draw some lessons: “[T]he populations who progressed the most culturally were not necessarily the most intelligent and skillful … but those who were able to network and pass on learning in large groups, and to maintain those group sizes most consistently through time and space. … Density was thus important for developing new ideas, but migration

Conditions for sustainable innovation  257 between groups was also vital, to ensure that such ideas had a better chance to persist and thrive, rather than decay and perish. … [G]enetic continuity, large brains, and intelligence on their own will not ensure success for human groups; the survival of knowledge itself is also vital” (2012:223–4). So, here are the factors to check on: population bottlenecks, population density, climate change, migration, and inter-group relations. Let’s begin with bottlenecks.

Bottlenecks The Homo sapiens population in Africa in MSA was low by modern standards, with people living in small, dispersed groups (McBrearty 2007). Caspari and Wolpoff (2013) suggest that for most of the Pleistocene the total would not have exceeded 1,000,000. About 75 ka there was a super-eruption of Mt. Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia (Wells 2010). The extensive ash fallout produced a “nuclear winter”, with temperatures falling 5–15°C (10–22°F). The cold persisted for millennia (Wells 2010; Lane, Chorn, and Johnson 2013). Undoubtedly, this rapid climate deterioration affected those alive at the time. India was influenced in particular and populations of non-sapiens hominins there are speculated to have suffered severely, as did Neanderthals in Europe (Finlayson 2009). It is also known by genetic analysis that the Homo sapiens population crashed at about the same time. Because conditions in East Africa were less affected by ash fall than in India and Europe, Lane, Chorn, and Johnson (2013) have questioned whether this reduction was a result of the eruption, though others (Fagan 2010; Wells 2010) have made that connection. The change in climate would have been globally felt, however, so most people would have been indirectly affected by the aftermath of the eruption. Indeed, cold in Europe, whether or not caused by Toba’s eruption, affected the climate in Africa, as is discussed further below. In any case, our species looked extinction in the eye. Some estimate that the total surviving Homo sapiens population fell as low as, perhaps 2,000 individuals (Wells 2006, 2010; Henshilwood 2007); Fagan (2010) opts for a somewhat higher figure: 4–10,000 females of reproductive age. The Tasmanian case indicates the likely result: where there were severe bottlenecks, sophisticated technologies probably all were lost and there was reversion to older, simpler technologies. In effect, our species went down a snake to the START square.

Population expansion Population expansion became rapid in Africa after the nadir at about 70 ka (Wells 2002; Henshilwood 2007; McBrearty 2007; Mellars 2007).

258  Stephen Davies And when members of our species left Africa about 60 ka, there was a further expansion of population in India and Asia beginning about 50 ka (Wells 2002). In the period 45–35 ka when our species entered Europe from the east and overlapped with Neanderthals, there was an estimated tenfold increase in our population (Mellars and French 2011) and the expansion continued there after the extinction of the Neanderthals (Wells 2002, 2010; Mellars 2009). Moreover, more individuals lived longer, which added to the cultural capital of their groups (Caspari and Wolpoff 2013). Though the period we are considering here is known as the Ice Age and was generally much colder than is usual now, it was characterized by considerable climatic variability and instability. Climate patterns, known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events, in which there was an initial rise of 10° C (18°F) or more within a few decades, followed by about a millennium of gradual cooling, occurred twenty-one times between 75–15 ka (Mellars 1996; Shackleton 2001; Maslin 2009). Inevitably, these had a major impact on the flora, fauna, and weather of a given locale. For instance, in some places, forest changed to open steppe on average in only 142 years (Finlayson 2009:132). Sometimes there was a swift onset to an especially cold period, usually of less than 1000 years. These Heinrich events, as they are called, were irregular (HE 5 was at about 45 ka; HE 4 at 38 ka; HE 3 at about 30 ka; HE 2 at about 24–23 ka; HE 1 at 16.8 ka). Some of them apparently were brought on by volcanic action (Golovanova et al. 2010). As native European citizens of long standing, the Neanderthals’ large noses and stocky frames were adaptations to the cold weather. But Heinrich events drove them to the southern coastal extremes of their range. Their extinction more or less corresponded with HE 4 and some posit a causal link between the extremely cold weather and their final capitulation (Gilligan 2007; Golovanova et al. 2010; Bradtmöller et al 2012).7 Homo sapiens, on the other hand, developed the eyed needle and could produce the tailored, layered clothing that saved us from the cold (Wells 2002; Gilligan 2007; Fagan 2010; Cook 2013). We survived for long periods on the Mammoth Steppe by constructing dwellings, using mammoth bones for framing and for fuel (Wells 2002; Finlayson 2009). Of course, this is not to deny that extreme cold also would have impacted many small, isolated groups as badly as it did the Neanderthals and it would exclude the survival of supra-regional networks (Bradtmöller et al. 2012). Meanwhile, in wetter, warmer periods, Homo sapiens were inclined to expand their range. The Sahara and Nile regions attracted people when the weather was favorable, and expelled them when it was not (McBrearty 2007). There may have been earlier excursions outside of Africa—there certainly was one to the Middle East about 110–80 ka (Wells 2002, 2006)—but many non-Africans have an ancestry that goes back to people who left Africa about 60 ka (Wells 2002; Klein 2008; Stringer 2012).

Conditions for sustainable innovation  259 This corresponded with a comparatively warm and stable period (Finlayson 2009; Fagan 2010). More generally, the climate began to warm about 17 ka, apart from the “Younger Dryas” Ice Age at 12.9–11.6 ka (Finlayson 2009; Fagan 2010; Wells 2010). By 16–14 ka the European ice sheets were in retreat and Homo sapiens occupied northern France, Denmark, and Britain. The Younger Dryas was followed by further warming until a change in the earth’s orbit that brought it nearer the sun produced the comparatively warm and stable climate of the Holocene (beginning at about 9 ka) (Guthrie 2005). So, the strongly marked European rise in the Homo sapiens population noted above correlates with the amelioration of prolonged cold and climate instability. Of course, the ever-increasing rate of population growth has continued since then, as has been true also (until recently) for many other animal species (Guthrie 2005).

The connection between technological innovation and climate change Our hominin and Homo sapiens ancestors all first evolved in Africa and it has been claimed that the habitat crucial for the selection of their adaptations was the savannas that appeared at the time (Wilson 1975; Orians 1980). But the fact of ongoing climate change, not only in the period discussed above but in the preceding millions of years (Potts 1998a, 1998b; Gräslund 2005; Maslin 2009), makes it unlikely that we adapted to any particular habitat (Davies 2012). Rather, we adapted to be capable of dealing with variable climates and habitats (Potts 1998a, 1998b). And, at least in the case of our species, this response often took the form of developing technologies appropriate to the local conditions. Consistent with this is the idea that innovation is driven by climate and/or environmental change (Potts 1998a, 1998b; Gilligan 2007; Bradtmöller et al 2012). Finlayson gives this example: “The people living in Eurasia and developing transitional or early Upper Paleolithic cultures [about 40 ka] were, not surprisingly, on the edge of the geographic range. As the steppetundra encroached, these edge populations became the front-line troops. They were faced with two options: adapt to the new circumstances quickly or die. The required change involved finding ways of living in, and hunting the animals of, the alien open and treeless habitats suddenly appearing everywhere. … It seems that the [people of this time] behaved with great flexibility and adjusted their activities and tools in response to changes in the environment” (2009:131). Aside from the flowering of art and ornament in the Upper Paleolithic, nothing more dramatically illustrated the innovativeness of European Homo sapiens than the turnover in lithic industries. The early Homo Acheulian

260  Stephen Davies industry persisted for more than a million years. The Neanderthals’ later Mousterian industry was largely unchanged for at least several hundred thousand years. With the arrival of the Aurignacian about 40 ka, a number of transitional, regional industries (Châttelperonian, Szeletian, Uluzzian) were short-lived. The Aurignacian industry gave way to the Gravettian (29–22 ka), which was followed by the Solutrean (22–17.5 ka) as the weather turned cold, after which came the Magdalenian (18–10.2 ka) with the upturn in the climate.8

Immigration It is not only as a result of climate change that our ancestors faced the challenge of unfamiliar or changing environments. Seasonal alterations can be dramatic for those who are sedentary. And those who journey globally encounter a range of environments on their travels. Under favorable conditions, our ancestors would have dispersed into similar, adjacent territories (Finlayson 2009). Eventually, these would have given way to changed landscapes. Being generalists rather than habitat-specific specialists, we might have explored these willingly, adapting our survival techniques and technologies to match the new conditions.9 As we have already observed, when our predecessors left Africa, they progressed to Australia and looped back into Europe via central Asia. They occupied eastern Asia at 45 ka, arrived in northwest America by 15 ka, and occupied the north of South America by 12 ka (Wells 2002; Dunbar 2004). Plainly, these treks involved negotiating many types of environments. And people settled. Members of our species came to live in the full range of habitats. We occupy tropical and temperate forests, plains, and savannas; mountain peaks and valley floors; coasts and interiors; and even the arctic, arid deserts, and swamps. And then, as now, we buffered ourselves against the raw environment or molded it to suit our needs (Laland, Odling-Smee and Feldman 2000; Taylor 2010). We wore clothes—starting sometime between 170–83 ka in Africa, so the clothing lice indicate (Toups et al. 2011)—built shelters, camped under overhangs or in caves. Typically, those who took up residence developed special technologies that allowed them to exploit the resources to hand; consider kayaks, barbed harpoons, spear throwers, nets, fish traps, and boomerangs, to name only a few.

Population density So, the demands of new or unstable environments are crucial drivers of technological innovation. But the preservation and communication of

Conditions for sustainable innovation  261 technological advances in oral communities depend also on population density, as we saw in the Tasmanian case. There is some critical population mass—presumably captured by Henrich’s formula—that, if not attained, leads to the cross-generational loss of sophisticated technologies and regression to much simpler ones. There are two further respects in which high population density is likely to be relevant to the level of innovation, one positive and the other not. More people means more brains, and where there is a social climate that acknowledges and rewards technological progress, there is an increased likelihood that current technologies will be improved or that replacement technologies will be discovered. But also, a high population might put pressure on limited resources, and this in turn could foster the creation and refinement of ways in which to increase the harvest that can be garnered (McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Henshilwood and Marean 2003). This last consideration might reasonably be thought to apply to us moderns, but not to the comparatively small populations that struggled for survival in prehistoric times. They were small-part players in a world dominated by wild animals. But recall the extremes of the Heinrich events that affected Europe in the Upper Paleolithic. These would have removed many animals and down-graded the prospects of catching them, all at a time when groups were fragmented and inter-group networks were fractured. This could have led, imaginably, to intense competition where different groups—of sapiens, Neanderthals, or both—came into contact. Perhaps this is relevant to isolated examples of cannibalism among Neanderthals (Fagan 2010; Stringer 2012) and among Homo sapiens, including 80,000-year old bones at Klasies River Mouth (McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Stringer 2012).

Intergroup contact and trade The hunter-foragers of the Upper Paleolithic lived in groups. These are estimated at 30–50 people (Dunbar 2004; Gräslund 2005; Guthrie 2005). But at certain times of the year it may be that groups congregated and exchanged goods and marriageable young people. In the southwest of France, large reindeer-hunting settlements were occupied for weeks or even months during the winter (Mellars 2009). These might have involved several hundred people (Fagan 2010). Intergroup contact at such times would have been crucial for the spread and preservation of new technologies. It is likely that the growing population of the time led to increased mobility and more complex systems of cooperation and competition between groups, resulting in increased personal ornamentation, material expressions of individual and group identity, as well as other forms of

262  Stephen Davies material information exchange between groups (Caspari and Wollpoff 2013). But above all it led to extensive trade networks connecting groups at a distance. As evidence of this, exotic items mostly used for decoration—such as perforated shells, pierced, rare teeth, crystals, amber, and jet—are found far from their original sources (Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2005; Mellars 2009).

Back to the Middle Stone Age We’ve focused mainly on the Upper Paleolithic, where the persistence and development of technology is apparent and where relevant archaeological material is readily available. But if we are to explain why the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort industries arose and persisted for millennia, we would expect to find similar evidence—climate instability (or socio-cultural instability and competition) as a prompt for innovation, and population density and intergroup trade as sustainers of new technologies. Here, the evidence is less clear but suggestive nevertheless. Geneticists who have adapted Henrich’s mathematical model calculate that population densities in Sub-Saharan Africa during the Middle Stone Age at about 101 ka were similar to those in Upper Paleolithic Europe from 45 ka (Shennan 2001; Powell, Shennan, and Thomas 2009). Here, it is relevant to appreciate that some of the crucial sites, such as Klasies River Mouth, Border Cave, and Blombos Cave, were already in regular use before 100 ka (McBrearty and Brooks 2000) and that innovative uses of ochre were already apparent at that time (Marean et al. 2007; Henshilwood et al. 2011). As well, an increase in trade (raw material transfer) occurred after about 130,000 years ago in Africa (Marwick 2003). The perforated shells in north Africa dated to 135–90 ka were at locations up to 190 km (115 miles) from the nearest coastal source (Vanhaeren et al. 2006; McBrearty 2007). And obsidian was transported in excess of 200 km (125 miles) in Kenya and Tanzania (McBrearty and Brooks 2000; McBrearty 2007); stylistic differences in tools made from the same raw source materials imply they were traded rather than transported. Turning more particularly to the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort industries, the evidence for long-distance trade is less obvious (Soriano et al. 2015). Perforated shells at Blombos Cave were 20 km (12 miles) from the source (Henshilwood 2009) and silcrete for tools at Klasies River Mouth came from at least a 15 km (9 miles) distance. Meanwhile, the small, geometric tools (such as arrow heads) of Howiesons Poort style were made from high quality raw materials that would be widely dispersed (McBrearty and Brooks 2000). These tools are like those exchanged by modern San groups. It has been suggested that such artifacts had symbolic significance, being valuable items in exchange networks, and that they were used to

Conditions for sustainable innovation  263 maintain group cohesion at times of resource stress (Deacon and Wurz 1996; Wurz 1999). McBrearty and Brooks argue that network maintenance among groups requires elaborate, ritualized exchanges: “Exchanges may involve marriage partners, raw materials, red ochre, objects of adornment and technologically important items such as projectile points, knives or axes, often in exotic and colorful materials carrying symbolic meaning. Such exchanges create far-flung reciprocity networks that can operate in times of scarcity to allow exchange partners and their families access to distant areas where resources are plentiful” (2000:532–3). The repeated appearance of the same lithic industries at multiple sites at more or less the same time, as occurred in Africa’s southern cape region, is probably indicative of intergroup communication and exchange. Jacobs and Roberts (2009) appeal to the genetic record in arguing that population expansion and the development of extended networks were crucial in promoting the innovation and spread of the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort industries, and that population decline and isolation went with their disappearance. A further driver of technological change, here as elsewhere, was abrupt climate change. Cold events in Europe led to drought in much of Africa and reduced monsoons in Asia, but also to unusually wet periods in the African Cape (Ziegler et al. 2013). Such climatic events corresponded to the appearance (and disappearance) of the Still River and Howiesons Poort industries. “The age of the SB [Still Bay] industry (71.9–71.0 ka) coincides within the error margins with one of the most extreme cold events in the Northern Hemisphere (cold Greenland stadial 19) … Similarly, the duration of the HP [Howiesons Poort] industry (64.8–59.5 ka) coincides with cold conditions in the North Atlantic Ocean and a dry phase in Asia. Our [data from river depositions at the time suggest] particularly wet (humid) conditions in the Eastern Cape during each of these intervals. The abrupt ending of the HP industry at 59.5 ka coincides with a rapid transition to drier conditions. During this transition, the Northern Hemisphere warmed abruptly (into MIS 3) and summer monsoon strength in West Africa and Asia increased” (Ziegler et al. 2013:4–5). These humid climate pulses created desirable “refugial” conditions in southeast Africa and favored population expansion there, as against the bottlenecking caused further north by climate deterioration. “The resultant demographic pulses can be linked to the innovations of the SB and HP industries, thus supporting one of the key models of cultural change in the Palaeolithic—a correlation between innovation and the adoption of new refugia with subsequent increases in population size, density and both intra- and intergroup networking” (Ziegler et al. 2013:6). As we have noted, population growth may have played a crucial role in perpetuating the technological innovations present in these lithic industries.

264  Stephen Davies As each phase ended and the climate altered for the worse in the south but improved in the north, the conditions for sustaining these industries presumably failed. When McBrearty and Brooks refer to subsistence “under adverse conditions such as those documented for the Howiesons Poort” (2000:516), presumably it is this period of decline to which they refer.

Conclusion At least one of the initiators of technological innovation has been identified: exposure to environmental change (caused by abrupt climate alteration, incursion into new areas, or increased pressure on resources). And considerations relevant to the perpetuation and development of existing technologies have been located: population density and intergroup sharing of knowledge and technologies. When applied to the events of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe from 40 ka and on, these help make sense of the spread and rate of technological invention and change. One would hope a similar story could be told about the anticipation of “modern” technologies lasting 80–60 ka in late MSA Africa. The evidence here is more sparse, but it appears to point to the same factors as leading to invention, transmission, and loss in cultural technologies.10

Notes 1 O’Connell and Allen (2007) put the date at 45–42 ka. Wells (2002), Dunbar (2004), and Stringer (2012) suggest even earlier dates; Klein (2000) and Pettitt (2011a) argue for 40ka. 2 Stringer (2012) gives 72 ka for Still Bay and 65 ka for Howiesons Poort; Jacobs and Roberts (2009) indicate 72–71 ka and 65–60 ka; McBrearty and Brooks (2000) suggest 66±5 ka for Howiesons Poort, while noting other estimates. The advanced tools at Blombos Cave are dated to about 75 ka (Mellars 2005; McBrearty 2007; Powell et al. 2009), as are the pierced shells (Henshilwood et al. 2004; d’Errico and Vanhaeren 2007). It should be noted that there is controversy about the accuracy of the optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) method of dating these industries (Soriano et al. 2015). 3 Not everyone thinks the African evidence completely changes the picture, however; see Conard (2010). 4 Here, I ignore the status of the Châtelperronian lithic industry (and the similar Szeletian and Uluzzian industries), a regional and very modern style of working stone and bone that is apparent about 42–38 ka. This has caused heated debate. Some authors insist that the evidence shows that it was an autonomous creation of Neanderthals. Others maintain that it was copied from Cro-Magnon sapiens. (Even if this is the case, however, this borrowing still speaks to the mental abilities and flexibility of Neanderthals—d’Errico and Vanhaeren 2007; Nowell 2010—though White 1992, 2007 disagrees.) Yet others fear that contamination of the archaeological record and difficulties in applying dating methods to the crucial period makes it appear only as if Neanderthals made and used these tools. 5 Note that flowers in a grave at Shanidar are no longer thought to be grave goods but rather the storage work of gerbils (Pettitt 2011a; Stringer 2012). 6 Or, to put the matter in terms that Wheeler (this volume) uses, it is outer-to-inner processes of creation, rather than inner-to-outer ones, that explain the dissemination or loss of technologies. 7 There is disagreement about our possible role in the extinction of the Neanderthals that I will not discuss here, but see Mellars (2005).

Conditions for sustainable innovation  265 8 Select references on the succession of lithic industries: Klein (2000); Mellars (2005); Fagan (2010); Stringer (2012). Lithic industries illustrate the point that creative change takes place against the background of traditions that constrain and channel it in positive directions. 9 See Wheeler (this volume) on how created products become adapted to their environmental niches. 10 I’m grateful to Chris Stringer for answering some queries and directing me to helpful readings.

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266  Stephen Davies Fagan, B. M. (2010) Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans, London: Bloomsbury Press. Finlayson, C. (2009) The Humans who went Extinct: Why the Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finlayson, C., et al. (2012) “Birds of a Feather: Neanderthal Exploitation of Raptors and Corvids,” PLoS ONE 7 (9) e45927 Garcia-Diez, M., et al. (2015) “The Chronology of Hand Stencils in European Palaeolithic Rock Art: Implications of New U-series Results from El Castillo Cave (Cantabria, Spain),” Journal of Anthropological Sciences 93 1–18. Gilligan, I. (2007) “Neanderthal Extinction and Modern Human Behaviour: The Role of Climate Change and Clothing,” World Archaeology 39 499–514. Golovanova, L. V., et al. (2010) “Significance of Ecological Factors in the Middle to Upper Paleolithic Transition,” Current Anthropology 51 655–91. Gräslund, B. (2005) Early Humans and their World, N. Price (trans.), London: Routledge. Guthrie, R. D. (2005) The Nature of Paleolithic Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henrich, J. (2004) “Demography and Cultural Evolution: How adaptive Cultural Processes can produce Maladaptive Losses—the Tasmanian Case,” American Antiquity 69 197–214. Henshilwood, C. S. (2007) “Fully Symbolic Sapiens Behavior: Innovations in the Middle Stone Age at Blombos Cave, South Africa,” in P. Mellars, K. Boyle, O. Bar-Yosef, and C. Stringer (eds.) Rethinking the Human Revolution, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 123–32. Henshilwood, C. S. (2009) “The Origins of Symbolism, Spirituality, and Shamans: Exploring Middle Stone Age Material Culture in South Africa,” in C. Renfrew and I. Morley (eds.) Becoming Human: Innovation in Prehistoric Material and Spiritual Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 29–49. Henshilwood, C. S. and Marean, C. W. (2003) “The Origin of Modern Human Behavior: Critique of the Models and their Test Implications,” Current Anthro­ pology 44 627–51. Henshilwood, C. S., et al. (2004) “Middle Stone Age Shell Beads from South Africa,” Science 295 1278–80. Henshilwood, C. S., et al., (2011) “A 100,000-Year-Old Ochre-Processing Workshop at Blombos Cave, South Africa,” Science 334 219–22. Jacobs, Z. and Roberts, R. G. (2009) “Catalysts for Stone Age Innovations,” Communicative and Integrative Biology 2 191–3. Joordens, J. C. A., et al. (2015) “Homo Erectus at Trinil on Java Used Shells for Tool Production and Engraving,” Nature 518 228–31. Klein, R. G. (2000) “Archaeology and the Evolution of Human Behavior,” Evolutionary Anthropology 9 17–36. Klein, R. G. (2008) “Out of Africa and the Evolution of Human Behavior,” Evolutionary Anthropology 17 267–81.

Conditions for sustainable innovation  267 Laland, K. N., Odling-Smee, J. and Feldman, M. W. (2000) “Niche Construction, Biological Evolution and Cultural Change,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 131–75. Lane, C. S., Chorn, B. T., and Johnson, T. C. (2013) “Ash from the Toba Supereruption in Lake Malawi shows no Volcanic Winter in East Africa at 75 ka,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 8025–9. Lawson, A. J. (2012) Painted Caves: Paleolithic Rock Art in Western Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lombard, M. and Phillipson, L. (2010) “Indications of Bow and Stone-Tipped Arrow use 64 000 years ago in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa,” Antiquity 4 635–48. Lombard, M. and Haidle, M. N. (2012) “Thinking a Bow-and-Arrow Set: Cognitive Implications of Middle Stone Age Bow and Stone-Tipped Arrow Technology,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 22 237–64. McBrearty, S. (2007) “Down with the Revolution,” in P. Mellars, K. Boyle, O. Bar-Yosef, and C. Stringer (eds.) Rethinking the Human Revolution, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 133–51. McBrearty, S. and Brooks, A. S. (2000) “The Revolution That Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Humans,” Journal of Human Evolution 39 453–563. Marean, C. W., et al. (2007) “Early Human use of Marine Resources and Pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene,” Nature 449 905–9. Marwick, B. (2003) “Pleistocene Exchange Networks as Evidence for the Evolution of Language,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 13 67–81. Maslin, M. (2009) “The Climatic Rollercoaster,” in B. Fagan (ed.) The Complete Ice Age: How Climate Change Shaped the World, London: Thames & Hudson, 62–91. Mellars, P. (1996) The Neanderthal Legacy: An Archaeological Perspective from Western Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mellars, P. (2005) “The Impossible Coincidence. A Single-Species Model for the Origins of Modern Human Behavior in Europe,” Evolutionary Anthropology 14 12–27. Mellars, P. (2007) “Rethinking the Human Revolution: Eurasian and African Perspectives,” in P. Mellars, K. Boyle, O. Bar-Yosef, and C. Stringer (eds.) Rethinking the Human Revolution, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeo­ logical Research, 1–11. Mellars, P. (2009) “Cognition and Climate: Why is Upper Paleolithic Cave Art almost confined to the Franco-Cantabrian Region?” in Renfrew and Morley (eds.) Becoming Human: Innovation in Prehistoric Material and Spiritual Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 212–31. Mellars, P. and Stringer, C. (eds.) (1989) The Human Revolution: Behavioural and Biological Perspectives on the Origins of Modern Humans, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mellars, P. and French, J. (2011) “Tenfold Population increase in Western Europe at the Neandertal-to-modern Human Transition,” Science 333 623–7.

268  Stephen Davies Mellars, P., Boyle, K., O. Bar-Yosef, O, and C. Stringer, C. (eds.) (2007) Rethinking the Human Revolution, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Nowell, A. (2010) “Defining Behavioral Modernity in the Context of Neandertal and Anatomically Modern Human Populations,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 437–52. O’Connell, J. F. and Allen, J. (2007) “Pre-LGM Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea) and the Archaeology of Early Modern Humans,” in P. Mellars, K. Boyle, O. Bar-Yosef, and C. Stringer (eds.) Rethinking the Human Revolution, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 395–410. Orians, G. H. (1980) “Habitat Selection: General Theory and Applications to Human Behavior,” in J. S. Lockard (ed.), The Evolution of Human Social Behavior, New York: Elsevier, 49–66. Peresani, M., et al. (2011) “Late Neandertals and the Intentional removal of Feathers as evidenced from Bird Bone Taphonomy at Fumane Cave 44 ky B.P., Italy,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 3888–93. Pettitt, P. (2011a) The Paleolithic Origins of Human Burial, London: Routledge. Pettitt, P. (2011b) “The Living as Symbols, the Dead as Symbols: Problematising the Scale and Pace of Hominin Symbolic Evolution,” in C. S. Henshilwood and F. d’Errico (eds.) Homo Symbolicus: The Dawn of Language, Imagination and Spirituality, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 141–61. Potts, R. (1998a) “Environmental Hypotheses of Hominin Evolution,” Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 41 93–138. Potts, R. (1998b) “Variability Selection in Hominid Evolution,” Evolutionary Anthropology 73 81–96. Powell, A., Shennan, S. and Thomas, M. G. (2009) “Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior,” Science 324 1298–301. Radovčić D., et al. (2015) “Evidence for Neandertal Jewelry: Modified WhiteTailed Eagle Claws at Krapina,” PLoS ONE 10 1371/journal.pone.0119802 Renfrew, J. M. (2009) “Neanderthal Symbolic Behavior?” in C. Renfrew and I. Morley (eds.) Becoming Human: Innovation in Prehistoric Material and Spiritual Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 50–60. Rodríguez, J. (2014) “A Rock Engraving made by Neanderthals in Gibraltar,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 13301–6. Roebroeks, W., et al. (2012) “Use of Red Ochre by early Neanderthals,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 1889–94. Shackleton, N. (2001) “Climate Change across the Hemispheres,” Science 291 58–60. Shennan, S. (2001) “Demography and Cultural Innovation: A Model and its Implications for the Emergence of Modern Human Culture,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 11 5–16. Soriano, S., et al. (2015) “The Still Bay and Howiesons Poort at Sibudu and Blombos: Understanding Middle Stone Age Technologies,” PLoS ONE 10(7): e0131127. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0131127

Conditions for sustainable innovation  269 Stringer, C. (2012) Lone Survivors: How We came to be the Only Humans on Earth, New York: Times Books. (Published in the UK as The Origin of Our Species.) Taylor, T. (2010) The Artificial Ape, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Tomasello, M. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Toups, M. A., et al. (2011) “Origin of Clothing Lice Indicates Early Clothing Used by Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 28 29–32. Vanhaeren, M., and d’Errico, F. (2005) “Grave Goods from the Saint-Germainla-Rivière Burial: Evidence for Social Inequality in the Upper Palaeolithic,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 24 117–34. Vanhaeren, M., et al. (2006) “Middle Paleolithic Shell Beads in Israel and Algeria,” Science 312 1785–8. Wells, S. (2002) The Journey of Man: a Genetic Odyssey, New York: Random House. Wells, S. (2006) Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project, Washington, DC: National Geographic. Wells, S. (2010) Pandora’s Seed, New York: Random House. White, R. (1992) “Beyond Art: Toward an Understanding of the Origins of Material Representation in Europe,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 537–64. White, R. (2007) “Systems of Personal Ornamentation in the Early Upper Paleolithic: Methodological Challenges and new Observations,” in P. Mellars, K. Boyle, O. Bar-Yosef, and C. Stringer (eds.) Rethinking the Human Revolution, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 287–302. Wilson, E. O. (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Wurz, S. (1999) “The Howiesons Poort backed Artifacts from Klasies River: An Argument for Symbolic Behaviour”. South African Archaeological Bulletin 54 38–50. Ziegler, M., et al. (2013) “Development of Middle Stone Age Innovation Linked to Rapid Climate Change,” Nature Communications, doi:10.1038/ncomms2897 Zilhão, J. (2007) “The Emergence of Ornaments and Art: An Archaeological Perspective on the Origins of ‘Behavioral Modernity’,” Journal of Archaeological Research 15 1–54. Zilhão, J. (2011) “The Emergence of Language, Art and Symbolic Thinking. A Neanderthal Test of Competing Hypotheses,” in C. S. Henshilwood and F. d’Errico (eds.) Homo symbolicus: The Dawn of Language, Imagination and Spirituality, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 111–31. Zilhão, J., et al. (2010) “Symbolic Use of Marine Shells and Mineral Pigments by Iberian Neandertals,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 107 1023–8.

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Part V CREATIVITY IN PHILOSOPHY AND MATHEMATICS

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16 Conceptual creativity in philosophy and logic Michael Beaney

Philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts. What Is Philosophy?, p. 5

Introduction ‘Creative’ is not a word that is frequently used in describing the work of philosophers and logicians. Indeed, to speak of a ‘creative’ philosopher or logician might suggest that they are simply making things up in wild speculation or putting forward arguments whose validity remains to be demonstrated. In the analytic tradition, in particular, ‘creativity’ is not a value that comes anywhere close to those of ‘clarity’ and ‘rigour’ in its selfdescriptions. If philosophy is essentially trying to gain insight into ‘truth’, about the fundamental nature of the world, human activities, thought and language, and their complex interrelationships, then how could creativity be involved? Is it not simply seeking to understand how things are? If the fundamental methodology of philosophy is ‘analysis’, then is this not a matter of investigating something very carefully, breaking it down into its constituent parts, assumed as already there, in order to see how it is put together? It only takes a little reflection, though, to realize that such a picture of philosophy is a gross caricature. Even if we think of philosophy as some kind of science, aimed at discovering the ultimate truths about the world and human activities, then the case of science itself should alert us to the rich variety of forms of creativity that may be involved. To take one of the most obvious examples, Albert Einstein was astonishingly creative in his work, as his use of thought experiments, in particular, demonstrates. Thought experiments are prevalent in philosophy as well, perhaps even more so. Descartes’ supposition of an evil demon, Putnam’s reflections about Twin Earth, and the trolley problem in ethics are just three prominent illustrations. In fact, there are many ways in which philosophers and logicians are creative. Thought experiments might be seen as just one type of scenarioimagination, as we might call it. To develop and test ideas and theories, philosophers and logicians must come up with appropriate examples.

274  Michael Beaney Imagination is clearly needed to think of the possible situations in which a concept or principle may or may not apply. The ability to come up with counterexamples is one of the skills of the philosopher, especially the analytic philosopher, even if it is one that we fail to encourage as much as we perhaps should in teaching philosophy. Scenario-imagination exhibits creativity just as much as story-telling does in a novel. There are also widespread myths about the nature of ‘analysis’. Schiller gave expression to one such myth when he wrote: “Like the analytical chemist, the philosopher can only discover how things are combined by analysing them, only lay bare the workings of spontaneous Nature by subjecting them to the torment of his own techniques” (1801: I, 4). On Schiller’s view, such a process of breaking something down into its parts only ends up destroying the spirit that animates it. But even on the decompositional conception of analysis assumed here, this is a caricature of what is involved, for the whole point of identifying the parts is to find out how everything holds together or operates as a whole. The aim is also to identify the structure and logical or functional interrelationships, and this may well require imagination and creativity in discerning the relevant structure or thinking through the possible roles that the parts may play. Although many people do indeed think of analysis as primarily ‘decomposition’, this is by no means the only meaning of ‘analysis’. In exploring the various conceptions and methods of analysis that can be found in the history of philosophy, I have distinguished three main ‘modes’ of analysis, as I call them: the regressive, the decompositional, and the interpretive (Beaney 2009). While decompositional analysis breaks something down to reveal its parts and structure, regressive analysis works back to first principles or causes by means of which something can then be demonstrated or explained, and interpretive analysis involves translating or transforming something in order to bring the resources of some appropriate theory to bear on the problem to be resolved. Both regressive and interpretive analysis also involve creativity. In the case of regressive analysis, the first principles will typically need to be hypothesized in order to see if they will suffice for then deriving what we want. As in all cases of hypothesizing, imagination may be needed to come up with possible principles, and even where there may be mechanical procedures for generating possible principles, it may help in the preselection of possibilities to avoid a purely trial and error method. In the case of interpretive analysis, there is enormous scope for creativity, both in the process of interpretation and in the choice of theory to be applied. I shall say more about this shortly. Philosophy, even analytic philosophy, does not just involve analysis, however. ‘Synthesis’ is also involved, different forms corresponding to the different forms of analysis. We may use the elements identified in

Conceptual creativity in philosophy  275 decompositional analysis to build new constructions, for example, or the principles reached in regressive analysis to prove new propositions. We may build on a whole set of interpretive analyses in developing a philosophical theory. My aim in this paper, however, is not to indicate all the different ways in which creativity is involved in philosophy, let alone to classify and offer an account of them all.1 What I want to focus on is what I call ‘conceptual creativity’. Conceptualization is fundamental to philosophy, which might even be called a ‘conceptual science’ (‘science’ in its broadest sense, as corresponding to ‘Wissenschaft’ in German). It is in the various processes of conceptualization, concept-formation, and conceptual change that some of the deepest philosophical questions arise. Here, too, creativity is involved in a number of different ways, and I cannot begin to do justice to them all in a single paper. My aim is far more modest: to consider four examples which indicate something of the way in which philosophy is creative at its deepest, conceptual levels. ‘Conceptual creativity’ can mean a number of different things, all of which I include under this heading: creativity in the formation of new concepts, creativity in the modification of existing concepts, creativity in the application of concepts, and creativity in the development of new conceptual frameworks. The four examples I have chosen to discuss, considered in turn in the next four sections, are intended to illustrate each of them. But let me stress at the outset that these four forms of conceptual creativity are not envisaged as sharply distinguishable and I leave open the question of what other forms of conceptual creativity might be creatively conceived. Where modification of an existing concept ends and the formation of a new concept begins, or where the application of a concept to new cases results in the modification of the concept, is notoriously difficult to determine—or better put, is dependent on the concepts we choose to employ in describing such phenomena. And how the formation, modification, and application of concepts are involved in the development of conceptual frameworks is an even more complex matter. In Section 5 I will outline the role that conceptual frameworks—or conceptual spaces, as she calls them—play in Margaret Boden’s account of creativity, and, in the final section, I will reconceive our four examples in the light of her account to bring out how they all, in fact, involve the development of new conceptual frameworks.

1  Cantor’s ‘discovery’ of transfinite numbers Consider two sets: the set of natural numbers, {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …}, and the set of square numbers, {1, 4, 9, 16, 25, …}. Which is bigger? An immediate thought might be that since both sets are infinite, they are the same

276  Michael Beaney size. Yet, the set of natural numbers contains all the members of the set of square numbers and many more; in more technical language, the latter is a proper subset of the former. Since a whole is surely greater than any of its parts, should we not take the set of natural numbers to be bigger than the set of square numbers? On the other hand, there is clearly a one–one correlation between the two sets: each member of the set of natural numbers can be uniquely paired with a member of the set of square numbers. 1 can be correlated with 1, 2 with 4, 3 with 9, and so on. If two sets can be correlated one–one in this way, then do they not have the same number of members? What we have here is a paradox, called ‘Galileo’s paradox’ after its appearance in Galileo’s Two New Sciences of 1638. There seem to be equally good reasons for holding that the set of natural numbers is bigger than the set of square numbers and for holding that they have the same number of members. Since this is obviously a contradiction, how can we resolve the paradox? One way to look at the problem is to see there as being two criteria for two such sets having the same number of members: 1 Neither is bigger than the other (in the sense of ‘bigger than’ for which a set is always bigger than any proper subset of itself). 2 Their members can be one–one correlated. In finite cases, these two criteria coincide. The two sets {1, 2, 3, 4, 5} and {1, 4, 9, 16, 25}, for example, have the same number of members on both criteria. In infinite cases, however, the two criteria come apart—and we then have to make a decision as to which to give priority. Following Georg Cantor (1845–1918), we now take the second criterion as primary and hence treat the two sets as having the same number of members. Does the set of natural numbers have the same number of members, i.e., the same cardinality, as the set of rational numbers? Here, too, we might initially think that the latter must be bigger than the former because it contains all the members of the former plus many more. But, in fact, by representing them in a two-dimensional table, the rational numbers can be correlated one–one with the natural numbers, so that the two sets can be shown to have the same cardinality. Does the set of natural numbers have the same cardinality as the set of real numbers? By now any ‘intuitions’ we might have had about this might seem highly unreliable. In this case, however, we can demonstrate—by Cantor’s so-called ‘diagonal argument’—that there are indeed more real numbers than natural numbers. The proof proceeds by supposing that the real numbers can be correlated one–one with the natural numbers by listing them in decimal notation (in whatever order we like) and then showing how a real number not on the list can be generated—by forming a new

Conceptual creativity in philosophy  277 number which differs from the first number on the list at the first place of decimals, from the second at the second place, from the third at the third place, and so on. We can generate a contradiction, in other words, by supposing that the natural numbers and the real numbers can be correlated one–one, the conclusion to be drawn being that the cardinality of the set of real numbers is greater than that of the set of natural numbers. Using the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Cantor symbolized the cardinality of the set of natural numbers by ‘ℵ0’ (‘aleph-zero’) and the cardinality of the set of real numbers by ‘ℵ1’ (‘aleph-one’). Both sets are infinite, but the second is nevertheless ‘bigger’ than the first. In fact, Cantor argued, there is a whole series of infinite numbers, ℵ0, ℵ1, ℵ2, and so on, which he called the ‘transfinite cardinal numbers’. The details of all this need not concern us here.2 Our interest lies in the conceptual creativity that is illustrated. By seeking to resolve the paradoxes involved in this area (of which Galileo’s paradox is just one), our everyday concept of infinity is shown to be inadequate, and is replaced, for the purpose of mathematics, by the concept of the transfinite, which can be given a more precise articulation. For those of a realist inclination, we might talk of Cantor’s ‘discovery’ of the transfinite numbers, but it would be more accurate to say that Cantor ‘created’ the concept of the transfinite number. Of course, he did not do so ex nihilo: he worked from the materials of our existing concepts and showed how they needed to be refined and transformed, in establishing a new branch of mathematics. Here we see the difficulty, too, in distinguishing between the formation of a new concept and the modification of an existing concept. Did Cantor ‘create’ the concept of a transfinite number or merely modify the existing concept of infinity? Given that the latter was inadequate, in giving rise to contradiction (with other assumptions), I am inclined to talk of creation or formation here, as indeed is suggested by the introduction of a new term, the ‘transfinite’. But others might prefer to draw the conceptual line between creation and modification slightly differently. Two more general points might also be seen as illustrated in this particular case. First, paradoxes have been a driving force in the development of philosophy throughout its history, from Zeno’s paradoxes in the West and Hui Shi’s and Gongsun Long’s paradoxes in the East, to the logical and semantic paradoxes that inspired and continue to inspire analytic philosophy. In a large number of cases, resolving them requires, at the very least, drawing appropriate conceptual distinctions, and hence as involving conceptual creativity. One way to resolve Zeno’s paradox of the arrow, for example, is to distinguish between ‘being at rest at an instant’ (understood as being at the same place immediately before and after that instant) and ‘not moving at an instant’: the latter does not imply the former (cf. Sainsbury 2009: 20). Resolving Meno’s paradox (the paradox of inquiry)

278  Michael Beaney requires distinguishing different kinds of ‘knowledge’ (concerning which there have been numerous proposals), and a first step in resolving the related paradox of analysis arguably involves distinguishing between ‘sense’ and ‘reference’, within some more general concept of ‘meaning’ (cf. Beaney 2005b). Other paradoxes can be resolved by restricting the applicability of a given concept. Russell himself suggested, for example, that the paradox now named after him can be resolved by outlawing talk of sets being members of themselves. If Tarski is right, then the Liar paradox needs to be resolved by rejecting our ordinary concept of truth in favour of a hierarchy of concepts of truth, each defined within the appropriate formal language. The theory of types and the theory of truth that resulted from Russell’s and Tarski’s approaches, respectively, are comparable to Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers in the creativity exhibited. Secondly, the diagnosis offered above of Galileo’s paradox is just one illustration of how criteria for the use of concepts come apart when we extend their application from ‘normal’ cases. We might regard ‘persons’, for example, as self-conscious, morally responsible human beings capable of sensing, thinking, and acting freely. But when we consider ‘abnormal’ cases, such as someone in a vegetative state or at a very early stage in their development in the womb, we realize that the various criteria packed into this conception of a person come apart and we have to make a decision as to which is really characteristic of ‘person’ and draw finer-grained conceptual distinctions. This is all part of the conceptual creativity involved in philosophical thinking. Analysis is required to unpack these criteria but their articulation and the refinement of concepts that results shows just how creative philosophical analysis is.

2  Frege’s construal of concepts as functions What are concepts themselves? There is now a huge literature offering answers to this question, and this is not the place to provide even the smallest thumbnail sketch. I shall confine myself here to looking at the answer provided by Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), who in creating modern logic rightly counts as one of the founders of analytic philosophy. Central to this creation was his modification of the very concept of a concept; yet, the conceptual creativity involved here is still not appreciated as much as it should. Frege’s new logical system was introduced in his first book, Begriffsschrift, in 1879. ‘Begriffsschrift’—literally, ‘concept-script’—was the name that he gave to his logical system, and this system was made possible by his use of function–argument analysis, carried over from mathematics. Traditionally, simple sentences such as ‘Gottlob is human’ had been analyzed in subject–predicate terms, formalized as ‘S is P ’, ‘S ’ representing the subject

Conceptual creativity in philosophy  279 (‘Gottlob’) and ‘P ’ the predicate (‘human’), linked by the copula (‘is’). Frege analyzed it instead in function–argument terms, formalized as ‘Fa ’, ‘a ’ representing the argument (‘Gottlob’) and ‘Fx ’ the function (‘x is human’), the variable x acting as the place-holder for the argument term. ‘Gottlob is human’ is thus construed as the value of the functional expression ‘x is human’ for the argument term ‘Gottlob’. The logical significance of function–argument analysis can only be appreciated when we consider more complex sentences such as those involving relational expressions and quantifiers. But this very simple example is enough for our present purposes. Traditionally, to say that Gottlob is human is to say that the concept human applies to Gottlob; the predicate ‘human’ was thus seen as representing this concept. Frege expressed this by saying that the object Gottlob falls under the concept human—or, more strictly, falls under the concept represented by the functional expression ‘x is human’. For Frege, such a functional expression is obtained by removing a name from a sentence; removing the name ‘Gottlob’ from ‘Gottlob is human’ and replacing it by the variable x yields the functional expression ‘x is human’. In the Begriffsschrift itself, he does not go so far as to state explicitly that concepts are functions, although it is often assumed that this was his view right from the beginning. What he thought of as functions at this time were just functional expressions; function–argument analysis provided a means of representing concepts, for the purposes of making logical relations clearer (see e.g. Frege 1879: section 9/1997: 65–8). In fact, what we now regard as Frege’s (mature) view of concepts—as functions that map objects onto truth-values—was not formulated until 1891, some 12 years later, in his essay ‘Function and Concept’. It would be wrong, then, to characterize Frege as having had the ‘insight’, early on in his career, that concepts are functions, from which he was able to develop his new logical system. Rather, the use of function–argument analysis allowed him to represent the logical relations between a whole range of different kinds of sentences (many more, and of far greater complexity, than had been fruitfully analyzed in traditional logic), and his philosophy developed by thinking through the implications of this. What we now take as Frege’s characteristic philosophical doctrines emerged after the initial development of his logical system. The absolute distinction he came to stress between concept and object was a reflection of his use of function–argument analysis. Concepts are ‘unsaturated’, he claimed, mirroring the ‘unsaturated’ or ‘incomplete’ nature of functional expressions (such as ‘x is human’), while objects are ‘saturated’, mirroring the ‘complete’ nature of the names that represent them.3 Moreover, it was only once he had formulated the distinction between ‘Sinn’ and ‘Bedeutung’ (which also made its first appearance in ‘Function and

280  Michael Beaney Concept’) that he was able to characterize a concept as the Bedeutung of a functional e­ xpression (concept-word) such as ‘x is human’. Before that time, his conception of a concept had arguably oscillated between what we understand by a concept-expression and what such an expression refers to.4 So here, too, there was philosophical thinking that had to be done before his mature view could be formulated. Frege also came to hold that concepts must be sharply defined: in other words, for every object it must be determined whether or not a given concept applies to it.5 Vague concepts, according to Frege, are thus not really concepts at all. Perhaps more than any other doctrine he held about concepts, this shows how Frege modified the concept of a concept, since most people—either before or after—would not regard the concept of being bald, for example, as not genuinely a concept at all. As in the case of Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers, it would be misleading to talk of Frege’s ‘discovery’ of the (functional) nature of concepts. Rather, his doctrines fell out of—or were invoked as an attempt to give support to—a new way of looking at things that resulted from the use of function–argument analysis in developing quantificational logic. Interestingly, though, in his early work (prior to 1891), Frege recognized certain kinds of conceptual creativity. Consider the example he gives in the Begriffsschrift of a sentence involving a relation: ‘Hydrogen is lighter than carbon dioxide’ (1879: 15–16/1997: 65–6). Depending on which name we remove, we get two different functional (concept) expressions. Removing ‘hydrogen’ yields the concept expression ‘x is lighter than carbon dioxide’. But if we remove ‘carbon dioxide’, we get the concept expression ‘Hydrogen is lighter than x’, or putting it the other way around, ‘x is heavier than hydrogen’. Both sentences ‘Hydrogen is lighter than carbon dioxide’ and ‘Carbon dioxide is heavier than hydrogen’, Frege argues, have the same ‘conceptual content’ (‘begrifflicher Inhalt ’), but this content can be analyzed in different ways, depending on which name we treat as the argument, yielding different concepts. Consider a second example that Frege also gives: ‘Cato killed Cato’. Here, as well as the two concepts represented by ‘x killed Cato’ and ‘x was killed by Cato’, we can also attain the concept of killing oneself if we remove the name ‘Cato’ at both occurrences (1879: 16/1997: 66). As Frege put it in his preface to the Begriffsschrift, “It is easy to see how taking a content as a function of an argument gives rise to concept formation” (1879: VII/1997: 51). In The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), the basic idea here is put to philosophically creative work in his discussion and use of what we now know as ‘abstraction principles’. To take one of his key examples, ‘Line a is parallel to line b ’ and ‘The direction of line a is equal to the direction of line b ’ have the same content, on Frege’s view. By grasping the content of the first and splitting it up differently, he argues, we can thereby acquire a new

Conceptual creativity in philosophy  281 concept—the concept of direction (1884: section 64/1997: 110–11). So, too, he suggests, we can arrive at the concept of number by recognizing that to say, for example, that the number of knives on the table is equal to the number of forks on the table is to say that the concept knife on the table is ‘equinumerous’ [‘gleichzahlig’], as he calls it, to the concept fork on the table, in other words, that the knives and forks on the table can be one– one correlated. Since one–one correlation can be logically defined, this opened up the possibility of defining number statements purely logically and hence demonstrating how arithmetic could be reduced to logic, which was Frege’s main philosophical goal. There is a great deal to say about all this, of course, and Frege himself recognized some difficulties in the strategy that he had outlined in the Foundations, which is essentially a strategy of contextual definition. I shall say more about contextual definition in the next section. But let me just conclude here by stressing the point that even Frege himself, who was one of the founders and archetypical practitioners of analytic philosophy, not only exhibited conceptual creativity in his own work, not least in modifying the very concept of a concept, but even drew explicit attention to certain forms of conceptual creativity—forms that were indeed exemplified in his philosophical and logical work.

3 Russell’s use of interpretive analysis in the theory of descriptions The theory of descriptions, first articulated by Bertrand Russell (1872– 1970) in ‘On Denoting’ in 1905, is rightly regarded as a paradigm of analytic philosophy. I have characterized it as exemplifying ‘interpretive analysis’, and what I want to show here is how this, too, is far more creative than is usually acknowledged. Before looking at the theory of descriptions, however, let us briefly return to Frege and consider two simpler examples to illustrate the basic idea. Take, first, the (true) claim that unicorns do not exist. This might be thought to raise philosophical problems. What are these unicorns that supposedly have the property of non-existence? If they do not exist, then how can we say anything about them, true or false? In modern quantificational logic, however, we would formalize this claim as ‘¬(∃x) Ux ’, read as ‘It is not the case that there is some x which is a U ’, with ‘U ’ representing the concept unicorn. This makes clear that what we are really saying is not something about unicorns (since they do not exist!), but about the concept of being a unicorn, namely, that nothing falls under it; in other words, we are taken as claiming that the concept unicorn is not instantiated. Frege, who invented quantificational logic, characterized this as a claim not about an object or objects falling under a first-level concept (a concept under which objects fall), but as about a first-level concept

282  Michael Beaney (in this case the concept unicorn) falling within a second-level concept (in this case the concept is instantiated). The claim that unicorns do not exist, in other words, is interpreted as the claim that the concept unicorn is not instantiated, the point being that this analysis shows how we do not need to attribute some kind of existence to unicorns in order to say what we want to say. Apparent reference to unicorns is ‘analyzed away’. Second, consider the related claim that all unicorns have one horn. This would be formalized in quantificational logic as ‘(∀x) (Ux ⟶ Hx)’, read as ‘For all x, if x is a unicorn, then x has one horn’. On this interpretation, too, there is no claim that unicorns exist, merely that if something is a unicorn, then it has one horn. Frege emphasized that what we have here is neither the subsumption of an object or objects under a first-level concept, nor of the falling of a first-level concept within a second-level concept, but rather the subordination of one first-level concept (the concept of being a unicorn) to another first-level concept (the concept of having one horn). Here, then, we also have an interpretive analysis, once again suggesting that what we have is a relation between concepts (though a different relation) rather than a relation between an object or objects and a concept. With these two analyses, we can now understand Russell’s theory of descriptions. Taking his famous example, ‘The present King of France is bald’ is interpreted as a conjunction of the following three sentences (with their formalizations in quantificational logic in square brackets): 1 There is at least one King of France. [(∃x) Kx] 2 There is at most one King of France. [(∀x) (∀y) (Kx & Ky ⟶ y = x)] 3 Whatever is King of France is bald. [(∀x) (Kx ⟶ Bx)] Bearing in mind the two analyses given above, the first can be taken as saying that the concept King of France is instantiated by at least one object and the second as saying that it is instantiated by at most one object, so that together they say that the concept King of France is uniquely instantiated. The third says that the concept King of France is subordinate to the concept bald, in other words, that whatever instantiates the concept King of France also instantiates the concept bald. Putting all three together, then, what Russell’s analysis essentially yields is the claim that the concept King of France is both uniquely instantiated and subordinate to the concept bald. Once again, then, we have an interpretive analysis that reveals that the relevant sentence is actually to be understood as expressing a claim about concepts, not about objects. In this case, the claim is a dual claim that a certain first-level concept (the concept of being King of France) falls within a second-level concept (the concept of being uniquely instantiated) and, furthermore, is subordinate to another first-level concept (the concept of being bald). This dual claim might seem very different from

Conceptual creativity in philosophy  283 the original, superficially simple claim that the present King of France is bald, but the reconceptualization that Russell offers is precisely what his theory of descriptions yields. In so far as it invokes these logical distinctions between subsumption and subordination, first-level and second-level concepts, and so on, and logical concepts such as that of instantiation, conceptual creativity is built into Russell’s interpretive analysis. Given that these logical distinctions (at least in the context of the new logic) were first drawn by Frege, Russell’s creativity here exemplifies the application— rather than formation or modification—of concepts, but this application was certainly a formative event in the history of analytic philosophy. The most significant feature of Russell’s theory, in this respect, is the way in which it ‘analyzes away’ the definite description ‘the present King of France’. Whether one expresses the analyzed form of the original sentence as ‘There is one and only one King of France and whatever is King of France is bald’ or as ‘The concept King of France is uniquely instantiated and subordinate to the concept bald ’ (or some variation of these), the definite description no longer appears, and hence any problems that might arise in wondering what its ‘meaning’ or ‘reference’ is simply disappear. What we have here is a contextual definition: the descriptive phrase is not defined explicitly but only implicitly through the paraphrase that is offered of the sentence as a whole. However controversial this particular example might be, the strategy that it illustrates (building on Frege’s own use of contextual definition) was both innovative and productive. It was conceptually creative not only in the concepts applied in its interpretive analyses, but also in the possibilities it opened up of a new form of philosophical methodology. As I see it, interpretive analysis is what is particularly distinctive of analytic philosophy as it developed in the work of Frege and Russell (see Beaney 2009, 2016). Interpretive analysis involves ‘translating’ sentences that give rise to philosophical problems of one kind or another into a form in which these problems are resolved or dissolved. Typically, these sentences are apparently about one set of things, but when ‘translated’ they show themselves to be ‘really’ about a different set of things. The relevant philosophical problems act as constraints on the interpretations, but this still leaves room for conceptual creativity: new concepts may well need to be developed or existing concepts applied in new ways in offering the requisite reconceptualizations.

4  Kant’s Copernican revolution We have focussed so far on some of the key conceptual developments in the creation of modern logic and analytic philosophy. But so much of analytic philosophy—and indeed contemporary philosophy more generally—has

284  Michael Beaney roots in the work of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Of course, one could go right back to Plato and Aristotle, but there is little doubt that Kant transformed the philosophical landscape at the end of the eighteenth century to such an extent that anyone who seeks to understand later developments has to see them in the context of this new landscape. Central to what we now know as Kant’s critical turn, first proposed and expounded with extraordinary sophistication in his Critique of Pure Reason of 1781, was what he himself called his ‘Copernican revolution’. So let us briefly look at this in seeing how here, too, conceptual creativity was involved. In the first Critique, Kant describes his Copernican revolution in the preface to the second edition (from 1787): Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us. This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest. Bxvi

The irony of this is that Kant’s revolution might be better described as anti-Copernican, in the sense that he suggested that we treat objects as revolving around us as cognizers rather than vice versa. But it is clear how he saw his revolution. As he had explained in the first edition of the Critique, his central question was ‘How are synthetic a priori judgements possible?’ This question, he had come to think, could not be answered purely through experience—by trying to derive such judgements from our cognition of objects, assumed as given independently of us. A new way of looking at things was needed, summed up in the claim with which he ends the paragraph describing his Copernican revolution: “we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them” (Bxviii). Before returning to this, let us go one step further back and ask how the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements became the central question for Kant. We can find the answer in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, which appeared between the first and second editions of the first Critique. What awoke him from his “dogmatic slumber” (1783: 20), he writes, was Hume, and in particular, Hume’s account of causation. Here is the key passage:

Conceptual creativity in philosophy  285 how is it possible, asked the acute man, that when I am given one concept I can go beyond it and connect another one to it that is not contained in it, and can indeed do so, as though the latter necessarily belonged to the former? Only experience can provide us with such connections (so he concluded from this difficulty, which he took for an impossibility), and all of this supposed necessity – or, what is the same – this cognition taken for a priori, is nothing but a long-standing habit of finding something to be true and consequently of taking subjective necessity to be objective. 1783: 29

To simplify a complex story, Hume had shown him that no purely empirical account could do justice to the necessity we take to be involved in causal connections; on the other hand, he agreed with Hume that reason alone could not demonstrate how the existence of one thing necessitated the existence of another (1783: 7). Kant’s response to this dilemma was to suppose that we read the necessity into our very experience of causal connection. It is constitutive of our experience that certain principles hold, such as concerning causation, and Kant set out to identify these principles and elaborate on how they should be understood as synthetic a priori. Once again, it is not our task here to give even the crudest thumbnail sketch of Kant’s account. The key point is just to highlight the extraordinary creativity exhibited in this new way of looking at things, which amounts to the creation of an entirely new conceptual framework. Not only did this enable him to provide an answer to Hume, but it also inspired Kant to the most productive decade that we have yet witnessed in the history of philosophy. It would be impossible to exaggerate the significance of the idea that our minds contribute something essential to our experience of the world, that we do not simply passively receive senseimpressions but actively give them form and synthesize them through the concepts of our understanding—whatever the precise nature of these concepts and processes may be, about which there has been controversy ever since. As in the case of Frege, but to a far deeper extent, Kant transformed our very concept of a concept. Concepts are not just ‘abstracted’ from experience but, at least in the case of what Kant regarded as a priori concepts, are actively involved in constituting that experience. Indeed, in Kant’s conception of the ‘spontaneity’ of cognition, whereby we freely apply the concepts of our understanding in experiencing the world, creativity is built into the very nature of conceptualization, an idea that was to prove powerful in romanticism. In fact, in a very literal way, we create the world we experience, according to Kant. As Kant put it, “The understanding is thus not merely a faculty for making rules through the comparison of the appearances; it is itself the legislation for nature, i.e., without understanding there would not be any nature at all” (1781:

286  Michael Beaney A126). This remark occurs in his chapter on the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, and in the following chapter, on the schematism of these concepts, he describes a further way in which creativity is involved. To apply concepts to objects we also need what he calls ‘schemata’, rules for generating images (in the case of sensible concepts) or ‘time-determinations’ (in the case of the pure concepts) appropriate to the concepts. This schematism, he wrote, “is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul” but is attributed to our powers of imagination (A141/B180–1). Our ability to apply concepts is thus creative through and through, on Kant’s view, exhibiting spontaneity and imagination and contributing to the construction of the world we experience. Conceptual creativity was not just manifested in the ‘Copernican revolution’ that gave rise to Kant’s critical philosophy, then, but was written into the very heart of his philosophical account.

5  Boden’s three conceptions of creativity Before elaborating a little and drawing some conclusions regarding the four examples we have just discussed, let us bring in the work of Margaret Boden, who has been one of the foremost theorists of creativity in recent years, beginning with the publication of The Creative Mind in 1990 (a second edition appeared in 2004).6 Boden has distinguished three main forms of creativity: combinational, exploratory, and transformational. Combinational creativity is exhibited in combining old ideas in new ways—as illustrated, in the simplest kind of case, by the formation of the idea of a unicorn by putting together the idea of a horse and the idea of a horn. The conceptions of exploratory and transformational creativity require Boden’s notion of a ‘conceptual space’ or ‘generative system’ (the expressions are used more or less synonymously, although the latter is the wider notion), understood as a domain of thinking that is governed by a set of rules and principles that determine what can and cannot be done within it. A conceptual space, Boden writes, is “the generative system that underlies that domain and defines a certain range of possibilities: chess moves, or molecular structures, or jazz melodies” (1994: 79). Exploratory creativity is exhibited in exploring the possibilities of a generative system, and transformational creativity is exhibited in changing a generative system by rejecting one or more of its constitutive rules and principles. I agree with Boden that while combinational creativity is often seen as the most common form of creativity, it is not the most interesting, and certainly not if we have in mind a simple additive model. Even if we restrict ourselves to conceptual/linguistic creativity, forming new concepts or terms by combining old ones is only one type of such creativity.

Conceptual creativity in philosophy  287 An example would be Frege’s introduction (mentioned in Section 2 above) of the term ‘gleichzahlig’ (‘equinumerous’), formed from ‘gleich’ (‘equal’) and a cognate of ‘Zahl’ (‘number’). But there are also cases where the simple additive model fails to do justice to the mode of combination. Compare, for example, ‘deathbed’ with ‘lifeboat’, both of which we can also see as combining two terms—‘death’ and ‘bed’, and ‘life’ and ‘boat’, respectively. But whereas a deathbed is a bed on which one dies, a lifeboat is not a boat on which one lives but a boat which saves lives. So while both involve combination in syntactically simple and similar ways, their semantic analysis is more complex and rather different. One of Boden’s objections to ‘combination theories’ of creativity is that they typically fail to explain how the combination came about (1994: 76). If part of what is meant is that more explanation is needed than merely identifying the component parts, then this is absolutely right. Boden’s main objection to combination theories is that they fail to do justice to what she calls ‘radical originality’, as opposed to mere ‘first-time novelty’ (1994: 76–8). We have the latter whenever something occurs for the first time but where it is generated by the same set of rules as other things. Radical originality occurs whenever something happens that could not have happened before, in the sense that there was no generative system by means of which it could have been generated. Combination theory can explain first-time novelty, but not radical originality, since what is at issue is not the creation of something new out of existing elements or within an existing system but the creation of a new generative system. Exploratory creativity is exhibited in exploring a conceptual space or generative system, according to Boden. One main example she gives is J. S. Bach’s exploration of the rich possibilities of classical tonal music, as paradigmatically illustrated in his 48 preludes and fugues of ‘The WellTempered Clavier’, which is based on the idea of a home key which governs each composition (1994: 80–1). Euclidean geometry provides a paradigm example from mathematics. We can be impressed by the ingenuity of Euclidean problem-solving and theorem-proving, but all this is governed by the rules and principles of the geometrical generative system (cf. Beaney 2005a: App. 1). Exploratory creativity can also be seen as illustrated in all four of our case studies. Cantor explored the possibilities of transfinite number theory, Frege the uses of function–argument analysis in developing quantificational logic, Russell the philosophical programme opened up by the kind of interpretive analysis employed in the theory of descriptions, and Kant the wide-ranging implications of his Copernican revolution. However, exploratory creativity, too, does not yield the ‘radical originality’ of which Boden spoke. This is only exhibited, according to Boden, in transformational creativity, which occurs when a generative system is

288  Michael Beaney transformed by dropping or negating one or more of its constituent rules and principles. The development of non-Euclidean geometry provides a classic example, which was triggered by the abandonment of Euclid’s fifth axiom, the so-called ‘parallel postulate’. One of Boden’s main examples again comes from music: Arnold Schoenberg’s invention of atonal music, which occurred when the convention of the home key, which was so important in Bach’s music, was abandoned altogether (1994: 81–2). What is crucial to Boden’s account of all this is the existence of a prior generative system which is sufficiently determined by its constituent rules and principles to allow radical change when one of its most basic rules or principles is rejected. Of our four examples, Kant’s Copernican revolution exemplifies most clearly transformational creativity. As we have seen, that revolution occurred by rejecting the fundamental assumption of (transcendental) realism— namely, that “all our cognition must conform to the objects”, as Kant put it (quoted above). But transformational creativity is also illustrated in the other examples. On the analysis offered in Section 1, Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers arose by dropping one of the two traditional criteria for two sets having the same number of members. In the case of Frege and Russell, it is less easy to identify a single fundamental assumption that was rejected or dropped in generating a new conceptual space. But we could describe Frege as rejecting subject–predicate analysis in favour of function–argument analysis in developing his quantificational logic, and Russell as dropping the assumption that ‘the present King of France’ had to have meaning in itself in formulating the theory of descriptions, although other assumptions could be identified as well in both cases. So what implications does this conception of transformational creativity have for our four examples?

6 Reconceiving conceptual creativity in philosophy and logic Boden’s account of creativity, and in particular, her use of the idea of a conceptual space in distinguishing between exploratory and transformational creativity, itself exemplifies conceptual creativity, enabling us to look at the various phenomena of creativity in fresh ways. Although I began by suggesting that the four examples selected were intended to illustrate the formation of new concepts, the modification of existing concepts, the application of concepts, and the development of new conceptual frameworks, respectively, we can now see that the first three and not just the fourth involve the development of new conceptual frameworks—or conceptual spaces, in Boden’s terminology. Cantor’s ‘creation’ of the concept of the transfinite number, for example, was embedded in the theory of transfinite numbers that he developed;

Conceptual creativity in philosophy  289 indeed, that theory is what gives content to the concept, so that it might be better to say that the concept was formed through the development of transfinite number theory. Frege’s modification of the concept of a concept was also embedded in his development of quantificational logic, which made essential use of function–argument analysis. The conception of a concept as a function seems to emerge naturally from the use of function–argument analysis, but as noted above, it took a while for Frege to state explicitly that a concept is a function that maps objects onto truthvalues. The ideas that enabled him to state this—such as the Sinn/Bedeutung distinction and the introduction of truth-values as objects—in turn led to modifications of his logical theory, so that once again we can see the formation or modification of a concept as bound up in the development of the relevant conceptual space. Finally, Russell’s application of the various logical concepts utilized in interpretive analysis (as pioneered by Frege) was embedded in his theory of descriptions, which in turn was embedded in the broader eliminativist programme of analysis that that theory made possible. To the extent that all four examples exemplify radical or extraordinary creativity, they do so by involving the development of a new conceptual space. This should hardly strike us as surprising, since conceptual creativity is deeper and more far-reaching the more it is realized in such a new conceptual space. Just forming, modifying, or applying a single concept is unlikely to have value in itself: it gains its significance in the context of the wider conceptual system in which it plays a role. The examples we have considered, then, provide confirmation of Boden’s view that radical creativity involves the development of a new conceptual space. Boden’s aim in introducing talk of conceptual spaces was to show how computational psychology could be used to ‘explain’ creativity—by modelling the previous systems which are then transformed by dropping or rejecting one or more of the constitutive rules and principles. These rules and principles need to be specified as accurately as possible for this account to work—to see what a generative system both can and cannot do (1994, p. 85). But as critics have pointed out, this generates a dilemma for Boden’s project.7 Either the idea of a conceptual space is so tightly constrained that it only applies to a few cases (such as the move from Euclidean to non-Euclidean geometry), or it is so loosely specified that anything can count as a conceptual space and computational psychology will not help us much in explaining creativity. The examples we have considered have all involved conceptual spaces that can be specified reasonably well. Certainly, this is true of transfinite number theory and quantificational logic. It is also true of Russell’s theory of descriptions, though the broader eliminativist programme of analysis is harder to characterize exactly. Kant’s system of transcendental idealism is

290  Michael Beaney a trickier case, as scholars have argued about this ever since Kant’s critical turn. But it seems reasonable to characterize it, as a starting-point, as the system that arises from rejecting the transcendental realist assumption noted above. But then, we do seem to have something that is too loosely specified for computational psychology to play much of an explanatory role. In what sense, though, does showing how a conceptual space is transformed ‘explain’ creativity? As a matter of historical or psychological fact, it will typically be far too simplistic to suggest that there was a single event of rejecting a key rule or principle that gave rise to the new conceptual system. Frege’s conception of a concept as a function is a case in point: it took a while to develop. Nevertheless, it seems to me that seeking to identify the fundamental assumptions and rules that are rejected and/ or replaced in developing a new conceptual space is the right analytical approach—whether or not it can be successfully or fruitfully modelled computationally. This helps explain why the transformation is creative, as well as its degree of creativity—depending on how basic the assumptions and rules are that are rejected. Nevertheless, the complexity of actual examples shows that this analytical approach must go hand in hand with more detailed historical work if fuller explanations are to be given, which explain not only how what was created actually occurred but also its significance. I have only been able to gesture at how such an analytical-cum-historical account might go in the four cases we have considered, but I hope that that is more than enough to demonstrate the depth of the creativity that is exhibited in philosophy and logic. Kant showed just how conceptually creative we all are, and philosophers, in my view, exhibit conceptual creativity par excellence. Proper appreciation of this is long overdue, especially among analytic philosophers, and I end with the simple plea for enrichment (both exploratory and transformational) of the conceptual spaces within which we discuss such creativity.8

Notes 1 See Hájek, in this volume, for further examples of creativity in philosophy. 2 For a fuller account, see Beaney (2017: ch.1), and Beaney and Clark (2018). 3 See his ‘Letter to Marty’ of 29 August 1882 (Frege 1997: 79–83), where the doctrine of the ‘unsaturatedness’ of concepts first appears. 4 For his later clarification of his (mature) view, see, e.g., his ‘Letter to Husserl’ of 24 May 1891 (Frege 1997: 149–50). 5 Again, this doctrine first appears in the ‘Letter to Marty’ of 29 August 1882 (Frege 1997: 80), but received its classic formulation in section 56 of Volume II of the Grundgesetze (Frege 1903: 69–70/1997: 259). 6 See also Boden 1994, which offers a summary of her views, and Boden 2010, collecting her more recent papers on creativity and art. I discuss Boden’s ideas in more detail than I can do here in Beaney 2005a: ch. 6. 7 See e.g. Novitz 1999: section 4. I discuss Novitz’s critique in Beaney 2005a: 181–5. 8 I am grateful to Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran for creatively engaging and productive comments on the first draft of this paper.

Conceptual creativity in philosophy  291

References Beaney, M. (2005a) Imagination and Creativity, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Beaney, M. (2005b) “Sinn, Bedeutung and the Paradox of Analysis”, in M. Beaney and E. Reck (eds.) Gottlob Frege: Critical Assessments, London: Routledge, Vol. IV, pp. 288–310. Beaney, M. (2009) “Analysis”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online at: plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis. Beaney, M. (2016) “The Analytic Revolution”, in A. O’Hear (ed.) The History of Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 227–49. Beaney, M. (2017) Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beaney, M. and R. Clark (2018) “Seeing-as and Mathematical Creativity”, in B. Harrington, D. Shaw, and M. Beaney (eds.), Aspect Perception after Wittgenstein: Seeing-As and Novelty, London: Routledge. Boden, M. A. (1990) The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; 2nd edn 2004, London: Routledge. Boden, M. A. (1994) “What is Creativity?”, in M. Boden (ed.) Dimensions of Creativity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 75–117. Boden, M. A. (2010) Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1991) What Is Philosophy?, tr. G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson, London: Verso, 1994. Frege, G. (1879) Begriffsschrift, Halle: L. Nebert; Preface and most of Part I tr. in Frege 1997, pp. 47–78. Frege, G. (1884) Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, Breslau: W. Koebner; selections tr. in Frege 1997, pp. 84–129. Frege, G. (1891) “Function and Concept”, in Frege 1997, pp. 130–48. Frege, G. (1893/1903) Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Jena: H. Pohle, Vol. I 1893, Vol. II 1903; selections tr. in Frege 1997, pp. 194–223, 258–89. Frege, G. (1997) The Frege Reader, ed. with an introd. by M. Beaney, Oxford: Blackwell. Galilei, Galileo (1638) Two New Sciences, tr. S. Drake, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974. Kant, I. (1781/1787) Critique of Pure Reason, tr. and ed. P. Guyer and A. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kant, I. (1783) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, tr. and ed. G. Hatfield, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, rev. edn 2004. Novitz, D. (1999) “Creativity and Constraint”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 77: 67–82. Russell, B. (1905) “On Denoting”, Mind, 14: 479–93. Sainsbury, R. M. (2009) Paradoxes, 3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schiller, F. (1801) On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. and tr. E. M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

17 Creating heuristics for philosophical creativity Alan Hájek

Introduction ‘Heuristics for philosophical creativity’ may sound like an oxymoron. Heuristics—tools or rules of thumb for problem-solving, forming judgments, and for cognitively challenging activities more generally—may seem antithetical to a romantic vision of the brilliant philosopher sitting with furrowed brow, peering into the realm of Timeless Truths, and then suddenly struck by a lightning bolt of insight, a ‘eureka!’ moment. The genius, doubtless tormented, perhaps cackling like Mozart in Amadeus, has no use for such plodding tools; nor does a lesser but nonetheless highly creative mortal—or so one may think. You cannot summon the muses; they summon you, says a sceptical voice. Less romantically, Kant and others have argued that genius, and by extension general creativity, is innate, and so cannot be learned or taught.2 Yet, heuristics can be learned and taught, often easily—indeed, that is typically their point. Moreover, philosophy may seem to be especially unsuitable for the deployment of heuristics. After all, it is supposed to be the love of wisdom; it strives for profound truths and deep understanding. But heuristics may be thought to be superficial by their very nature. “There are no short-cuts to sophia,” our sceptic adds. I do not share this view of creativity, romantic or otherwise, nor this view of philosophy’s recalcitrance to heuristics. I side with Aristotle, who insisted that conscious effort is often needed to bring creative works to fruition. Indeed, ‘eureka’ and ‘heuristic’ have the same etymology in ancient Greek: heúrēka, meaning ‘I have found (it)’, is a form of the verb heuriskō, ‘I find’. I am convinced that a good portion of creativity may be achieved with hard work, but some of this work can be eased by the use of heuristics. One’s creativity can be enhanced by learning and internalising appropriate techniques. High among my reasons for believing this is what I take to be an existence proof: various heuristics do enhance creativity. The proof is in the doing. This is clearly true in fields such as mathematics and creative writing, as we will see (cf. Gaut 2014). I will contend that it is also true in philosophy. I will offer some specific heuristics that I submit can enhance one’s philosophical creativity. And perhaps even the genius, cackling or not, may benefit from them.3

1

Heuristics for philosophical creativity  293

Heuristics for philosophical creativity: overview Let me say more about my project of offering some heuristics for ­philosophical creativity, by saying more about ‘heuristics’, ‘philosophical’, and ‘creativity’. Heuristics make complex or difficult tasks simpler. Good heuristics guide us to accomplishing such tasks well. As such, there are heuristics for chess, checkers, bridge, bridge-building, football, baseball, base-jumping, pottery, poetry, and so on. Closer to home, heuristics for creative writing and for mathematics have long been studied and taught—see Anderson (2006) for the former, and Pólya (1957) and Tao (2006) for the latter. We will see a good one for creative writing shortly. Here’s a good one for mathematics: when you are not sure how to prove something, perhaps because it seems so obvious, try reductio ad absurdum. These works should silence the sceptical voices I entertained at the outset that there can be no heuristics for creativity. There are many of them in these areas; ergo, there can be. It should come as a great surprise, then, if there were no such heuristics in philosophy. Why should we philosophers be so unlucky? The best heuristics tend to have the best ratio of value of outputs to ease of use—of bang for one’s cognitive buck, if you will. The best heuristics will also be general enough to be usable with some frequency. The more specific heuristics will tend to be easier to use, but less frequently usable. Good heuristics are more like an adjustable spanner, with a movable ‘jaw’ that accommodates nuts of various sizes, than a fixed-width spanner that is ideal for nuts of one size but useless for the rest. I aim to offer heuristics for philosophical creativity that strike well the balance between effectiveness, ease, and applicability. This brings me to ‘creativity’. I follow Gaut’s characterisation (this volume) that creativity is an agential disposition to produce things that are new and valuable of their kind, though much of what I say is compatible with other understandings of creativity. Sawyer nicely debunks various myths about creativity that would sit ill with my project—for example, “creativity is spontaneous inspiration”—and he concludes that “[m]ost creative activity is conscious, skillful, guided hard work” (2006: 21). The literature on creativity is huge, especially in psychology, but I’m not aware of anything on philosophical creativity. I offer here a philosopher’s approach to philosophical creativity. This brings me to ‘philosophical’. Heuristics aid in the achievement of goals. The goal of chess is to checkmate one’s opponent. What are philosophy’s goals? There are many, and they vary widely across philosophical traditions, periods, and sub-fields. ‘Gaining wisdom’ is nearly vacuous, and too general to be useful here. But if I get too specific, I risk excluding much of what counts as philosophy. Suffice to say that I am ensconced in the

294  Alan Hájek Western contemporary analytic tradition, and much of the philosophy that engages me involves exploring and mapping conceptual space. Sometimes it’s a piece of conceptual analysis, or a counterexample to a putative analysis; sometimes it’s spelling out a philosophical view’s presuppositions or consequences, welcome or otherwise; sometimes it’s a thought experiment; sometimes it’s pointing out a tension or even inconsistency between one view and another; sometimes it’s generating a paradox; and so on. By my lights, then, good philosophical heuristics help further these activities—and various others, which I would struggle to capture with an exhaustive list. Previously (2014, 2016), I have identified and studied heuristics such as these: • Reflexivity/self-referentiality. In a slogan, give a view a taste of its own medicine: apply the view to itself. More generally, consider self-referential cases. (Think of the liar paradox; more on that shortly.) Cantor, Russell, and Gödel used this technique fruitfully; you might too. • Check extreme/near-extreme cases. Test how a philosophical position handles extreme cases—the first, the last, the biggest, the smallest, and more generally cases that are maximal in some respect or other. (Think of the St. Petersburg game.4) Also test how it handles near-extreme cases, which may be more realistic. (Think of the St. Petersburg game truncated at a finite point.) • See definite descriptions in neon lights. A philosophical position that appeals to ‘the X’ appears to presuppose that there is exactly one X. Try to challenge this presupposition on both sides: could there be no X’s? More than one X? (Think of functionalist accounts of theoretical or folk-theoretical terms that invoke locutions such as ‘the Y role’ [neon lights], or better still, ‘the occupant of the Y role’ [double neon lights].) • Continuity reasoning. Often, when one variable is a function of another, we expect small changes in the latter to lead to small changes (at most) in the former, in the manner of a continuous function. We often baulk at sudden ‘jumps’ in a function, or in the application of a predicate. (Think of the sorites paradox.) Continuity reasoning is common and fertile in philosophy, as it is in mathematics. And so it goes—I have discussed many such heuristics in print, and I have hundreds more on my hard drive. I am surprised that philosophers have written so little about such heuristics, when practitioners in other areas— chess, bridge, etc.—have written so much about theirs. Again, some mathematicians have been quite self-conscious about their techniques. Indeed, philosophers can learn from the mathematicians and import some of our heuristics from them (Pólya offers the ‘extreme cases’ heuristic, for instance). And perhaps we can also export some of ours to them.

Heuristics for philosophical creativity  295 Philosophers ought to be cataloguing our heuristics, twice over—firstly because (like these other areas) it is clear that we have them, and secondly because it’s a natural part of our job description as philosophers (unlike practitioners in these other areas) to be singularly reflective about our methodology. Yet, I am aware of only a handful of works on philosophical heuristics—notably Baggini & Fosl (2003), Dennett (2013), Hartman (2015), and a few pages of Nozick (1993). And again, I am not aware of any works explicitly addressing the topic of philosophical creativity, though to be sure, some of the heuristics in the ones that I have cited further that goal. There are several stages or aspects of philosophical enquiry, including problem generation (e.g., posing a question, puzzle, or paradox), hypothesis/theory generation, argument generation, hypothesis/theory/argument evaluation, meta-evaluation (evaluation of our methods of evaluation), and refinements of all these. I will showcase heuristics for creativity for each of these. It should become clear that using them leaves plenty of room for wisdom—notably, knowing when and how to use them.5 Heuristics can be misused, but then so can quantum mechanics. That’s not their fault. And it’s no reason not to study them or teach them. Let’s go.

Philosophical fridge words There are many techniques for determining what follows (or not) from X; but how about coming up with a fruitful X in the first place? You can just sit and hope for a lightning bolt to strike you. But you can do better: you can move closer to where the lightning is, so that you’re more likely to be struck. Let’s begin with a heuristic that is unquestionably easy to use. It is clearly a good technique for producing new things; how good it is at producing valuable things depends on its user, but we will refine it in any case. It is especially useful for problem generation and hypothesis generation. Begin with Magnetic Poetry. Its creator, Dave Kapell, was suffering from writer’s block while trying to compose song lyrics. He wrote down various interesting words on pieces of paper, and rearranged them in various ways, looking for inspiration. He glued the words onto magnets, and placed the magnets on his fridge. Friends started to get involved with rearranging the words to form striking poems. And a popular pastime was born, exemplifying a good heuristic for creative writing.6 Now transport this idea to philosophy. Begin with a topic of interest to you. Write down all the keywords you can think of on this topic on separate pieces of paper; you can even paste them onto fridge magnets. Then rearrange them in various ways, juxtaposing pairs, triples, and

296  Alan Hájek perhaps more. Sometimes you will get nonsense, sometimes you will get ­something familiar, and sometimes you will get something new and interesting. (Some philosophical judgment will presumably be needed to know which is which.) Artists and philosophers are said to “make the familiar strange”. In using this heuristic, try to make the strange familiar: force yourself to confront unfamiliar juxtapositions of ideas, and to try to make something worthwhile out of the results. The idea is to take yourself out of your comfort zone, out of entrenched ways of thinking, and to make yourself explore alien patterns of thought. Here is an example of my own explorations with the philosophical fridge words heuristic. The topic: conditionals. I begin by free associating, thinking of as many words or phrases concerning conditionals as I can— they might, for example, be keywords that one finds in abstracts of various papers on conditionals. Here are some of them (space precludes me from including them all, and it should not matter if some of them mean nothing to you): • • • • • • • • • • • •

indicative conditionals counterfactuals material conditional strict conditional(s) Ramsey test Adams’ Thesis no-truth-value theories embedding iterations centering, weak centering Sobel sequences modus ponens and violations thereof.

Now, start shuffling and combining! Some juxtapositions seem to be unpromising—e.g., • counterfactuals/material conditional. (The material conditional is a non-starter for an account of counterfactuals.) Some juxtapositions are familiar—e.g., • Adams’ Thesis/no-truth-value theories.7 (Adams offered his Thesis to provide a no-truth-value theory of indicative conditionals.) But eventually we get something potentially interesting:

Heuristics for philosophical creativity  297 • counterfactuals/modus ponens and violations thereof. Could there be violations of modus ponens for counterfactuals? Has lightning struck yet? If not, try moving still closer to it. Add a further word or phrase to our combination. Eventually we will get: • iterations/counterfactuals/modus ponens and violations thereof. Bingo! (The sound of lightning striking?) Anyone up to speed on the conditionals literature will know of McGee’s (1985) apparent counterexamples to modus ponens involving iterations of indicative conditionals. Now try them for counterfactuals instead. It seems that they are just as compelling.8 For example, in the 1980 U.S. presidential election, there were three candidates: the Republican Reagan, who won; the Democrat Carter; and the long-shot independent Anderson, who counted as a Republican. Consider this instance of modus ponens involving counterfactuals: 1 If a Republican had won, then if Reagan had lost, Anderson would have won. 2 A Republican won. Therefore, Conclusion. If Reagan had lost, Anderson would have won. Premise 1 seems true: Reagan and Anderson were the only two republicans. Premise 2 is indisputably true. But the conclusion is clearly false, as Anderson was such a long shot. We seem to have a counterexample to modus ponens for counterfactuals. If so, it is trouble for most theories of counterfactuals, such as the similarity-based semantics for counterfactuals of Stalnaker (1968) and Lewis (1973), for which modus ponens is valid. To be sure, it is worth investigating further whether it really is a counterexample, and whether it really poses such trouble. Anyway, we have generated a problem—an interesting one, I hope. How do you come up with the keywords for a given topic in the first place? If you know the topic well, you can do a good job yourself. If you don’t, and even if you do but you want to do a better job yourself, you have a valuable on-line resource at your disposal: PhilPapers. It divides philosophical topics into sub-topics, and then cites many papers in each of them. Never mind the citations—help yourself to the sub-topics for your fridge magnets! Having done so, you may want to add some further words into the mix that are not specific to your topic, but that are more generic: e.g., analysis, explanation, reduction, dependence, supervenience, grounding, constitution, causation, consistency, possibility, probability, normativity, rationality, morality,

298  Alan Hájek reasons, theoretical, practical, semantics, pragmatics, truth, vagueness, indeterminacy, r­ epresentation, … (you will be better than I am at producing such a list that is suitable for your purposes). They will generate yet more combinatorial possibilities for your fridge magnets. If you like, you can expand your list of keywords and phrases still further, borrowing from other areas of philosophy. Confining yourself to the familiar categories of your topic might make it harder for you to ‘think outside the box’, and still more inspiration might be found elsewhere. For example, there are various parallels between epistemology and ethics, and someone working on an epistemological topic might profitably sprinkle in some terms from counterpart discussions in moral philosophy.9 That said, you should not go overboard with such importation—you do not want too much of a combinatorial explosion. And so it goes. I submit that the philosophical fridge words heuristic is useful at the brainstorming stage of philosophical enquiry, when you are throwing ideas on a page (or a fridge), and you are considering which ones have promise. Like Kapell, you might even invite your friends to join you. I did so with a group of ANU graduate students on the topic of time, using the PhilPapers sub-topics, and I think that several good ideas for papers were born at morning tea. “But what about wisdom and depth?” a critic complains. Wisdom—that is, good philosophical judgment—is needed to cull unpromising leads, and to recognise and follow up on promising ones. As for depth—I only claim that this heuristic is useful for the early stages of philosophising. Depth can come later. Moreover, even a genius might benefit from the fridge magnets heuristic—indeed, perhaps even more than the rest of us. After all, she should be especially good at seeing something promising in unfamiliar combinations of ideas, which might elude the rest of us.

Add constraints So far, this heuristic may seem too freewheeling, too random, too haphazard, and not serious enough for your liking—though seriousness and value seem quite orthogonal to me. (And creativity itself is often the result of random or haphazard events or processes—witness Kekulé’s discovery of the benzene ring after having a dream of a snake eating its own tail.) Very well, then; add constraints. It is well known in the psychological literature that constraints can enhance creativity—‘necessity is the mother of invention’, and all that. (See Stokes (2006).) Blues musicians improvising within a 12-bar structure know this. Songwriters and poets know this; think of constraints on metre or rhyme, as we find in sonnets, for example. The Oulipo group of (mostly French) writers and mathematicians impose constraints on their works to foster creativity.

Heuristics for philosophical creativity  299 In order to work within constraints, one often has to be resourceful and imaginative—which is to say, creative. And constraints may direct our minds to places—often good places—to which they would not otherwise go, by dint of habit, or training, or other contingencies. Unconstrained, we may merely follow the road more travelled. Indeed, constraints may take the form of desiderata that we impose on our outputs, ensuring that they meet certain standards of adequacy. This guarantees that the road we take gets us to a place we want to be. Philosophers often ‘tie their hands’ in their works by helping themselves to just a limited stock of concepts, properties, or statements. According to the logical positivists’ verificationism, unverifiable statements are meaningless; according to Popper’s falsificationism, unfalsifiable statements are unscientific. These doctrines impose constraints on what kinds of sentences are admissible in certain domains. In a more practical domain, we might impose constraints of feasibility, or computational tractability. Furthermore, many philosophers deliberately impose upon themselves a restricted or privileged vocabulary, and they seek to analyse or understand everything else in those terms—think of Lewis’s (1986) ‘Humean supervenience’ program, or Chalmers’ (2012) project of constructing all of reality out of a limited stock of base truths. Indeed, a way to get your creative neurons firing, as it were, is to (temporarily) imagine yourself to be a particular philosopher tackling a particular problem. How would Kant approach this? Or Hume? Or Quine? (Some familiarity with the history of philosophy will be helpful here.) Among other things, it may force yourself to approach a familiar problem on which you have been making no progress from a somewhat unfamiliar perspective. If you still make no progress, no matter—just move on, perhaps to another philosopher! Returning, then, to the philosophical fridge words: a juxtaposition of words that at first yields nothing interesting might suddenly do so when you impose a further constraint—for example, a set of desiderata that your theorising must meet. Philosophical wisdom may be required in judging what these constraints should be, and given the diversity of subject matters and goals of theorising, it is difficult to give all-purpose heuristics. But here is one.

Taxonomise and colonise This heuristic is for the ‘hypothesis generation’ phase of philosophical enquiry. Famously, after Mendeleev had formulated his periodic table, he noticed that there were various ‘missing’ elements, and chemists were inspired to look for and eventually discover them. Perhaps there is something of a lesson here for philosophers.

300  Alan Hájek When approaching a philosophical topic, draw up a table of ­distinctions, ways of categorising the things in the relevant domain. Fill in the boxes with existing views, look for empty boxes, then try to fill them with new views that meet their constraints. If there are no empty boxes, try finergrained distinctions, and repeat. (Some of the fridge magnet keywords may be useful here.) It will often help to superimpose cross-cutting distinctions, forming rows and columns of a table. Let’s assume that various parts of logical space on this topic—­various boxes—have already been colonised by previous authors. There may be a good reason for that. Perhaps certain conjunctions of the row- and column-categories are especially promising, ripe for the taking, and so they have already been taken. Perhaps certain conjunctions are especially unpromising, and they have been avoided for good reason. In extreme cases, there may be entailments between the row-categories and the column-categories that force certain cells in the table and that preclude others. On the other hand, there may be no good reason why certain cells remain vacant, terra incognita. It may just be a matter of historical accident—nobody happened to get there before you. Then they’re yours for the taking—go ahead and colonise them! Now, it may not be so easy to occupy philosophical territory like this. After all, theorising is not easy, even when its contours have been predetermined. Still, it will often be easier than doing so ex nihilo, coming up in the first place with a view that occupies a particular location in conceptual space, and then recognising that location after the fact. In locating its position by the coordinates provided by the distinctions that you have imposed, you are already halfway there, so to speak. It’s rather like a heuristic of mathematicians: when faced with a recalcitrant problem, work backwards by guessing the form of a solution, and then work forwards to reach it. (Think of building two tunnels starting from opposite ends until they meet in the middle.) To be sure, a new view is not necessarily a good view—novelty and value are also orthogonal. Don’t rest content merely with appropriating a new region of logical space, and please don’t read me as suggesting that you do so. Having generated a view, you must evaluate it. But far from being in any tension with creativity, this is exactly in accordance with the dominant Geneplore model of creativity (see Ward and Kolomyts 2010: 94-5). On this model, creative thinking involves two kinds of cognitive processes: generative, and exploratory. ‘Taxonomise and colonise’ is intended solely for the generative stage. In evaluating your new view, you should be able to draw to some extent on arguments for other existing views in the same column or row.10 After all, they must share some features with your view, for which their advocates may well have argued. On the other hand, arguments against existing

Heuristics for philosophical creativity  301 views that share your view’s row or column may count equally against your view; so beware, and be wary! Ideally, your view will bask in any glory that ­neighbouring views may enjoy, while avoiding their pitfalls. You might write down in the boxes next to the views their various virtues and vices, to help keep them in mind. Still, having explored your view, you may want to reject it. In that case, you could try to generate another theory that fills the same box; or you could move on to another empty box and try to fill it. In the happy case that you hit upon a theory that meets your needs and approval, the heuristic has done its work for you. But the case in which you find no such theory need not be unhappy. The very act of drawing up the table in the first place may well have alerted you to distinctions and possibilities that you had never considered, and made you more sensitive to their interrelations; and the very act of rejecting a theory may well give you more insight into where the truth really lies. In short, you may have learned something valuable. Furthermore, your search may still bear fruit. After all, you may be able to refine your initial theory, without outright rejecting it. In constructing your table, it is important to make distinctions at the right level of grain—there should not be too few boxes (e.g., every box has already been occupied, or every vacant box is clearly a non-starter), nor too many boxes (which may be unwieldy). And it is important to make the right distinctions, ones that cut along rather than across natural categorisations of the subject matter at hand. Now, don’t ask me to give heuristics for identifying natural categorisations—and don’t ask me to solve the grue paradox either! Philosophical wisdom plays a role here, again. A good philosopher can sense when a distinction cuts deeply, as it were, so that the things so distinguished are importantly different from each other, and the things falling in the same category are importantly similar. The injunction to ‘carve at the joints’ of one’s subject matter applies to philosophy as much as to science. Let’s see the ‘taxonomise and colonise’ heuristic in action, continuing with our conditionals example. We could make various distinctions involving theories of conditionals. But two important ones are: whether they are about indicative conditionals or counterfactuals, and whether they regard them as having truth-values or not. So let’s build a table out of these distinctions, and fill the resulting cells with the names of some authors who have advanced corresponding theories, standing in for their theories themselves:11

Indicatives Counterfactuals

Truth-Valued

Non-Truth-Valued

Grice Stalnaker, Lewis, Leitgeb

Adams Edgington

302  Alan Hájek For example, Grice believes that indicative conditionals have truth-values, given by material conditionals. At this level of grain, there are no empty boxes. Very well then—let’s try a finer level of grain. We can do that by superimposing another cross-cutting distinction: whether the theory in question is probabilistic or not.12

Indicatives Counterfac­tuals

Truth-Valued Truth-Valued & & Probabil­istic Non-Probabilistic

Non-Truth-Valued Non-Truth-Valued & Probabilistic & Non-Probabilistic

? Leitgeb

Adams Edgington

Grice Stalnaker, Lewis

Levi ?

Bingo! Nobody to my knowledge has come up with theories in the cells that I have designated with question marks: 1 A probabilistic truth-valued account of indicative conditionals. Here’s a first stab: ‘if A then C’ is true if P(C | A) > t, where t is a contextually determined threshold, and ‘P’ is an appropriate probability function—perhaps one that codifies evidential relations. (Compare Leitgeb’s theory of counterfactuals—residing in a ‘nearby’ box— whose truth conditions are like this, with ‘P’ being the chance function; and the so-called ‘Lockean Thesis’ that belief is high degree of confidence: you believe that X if your probability for X is above a contextually determined threshold.) 2 A no-truth-valued, non-probabilistic theory of counterfactuals. Here’s a first stab: counterfactuals do not have truth-values, but have acceptance conditions given by a suitable theory of belief revision— a theory of how beliefs should be revised upon subjunctive (rather than indicative) suppositions (compare Levi’s theory of indicative conditionals). Now, moving on to the evaluation stage, I can immediately see problems with these theories. For example, a problem for 1) is analogous to a wellknown problem for the Lockean Thesis. According to 1), indicative conditionals will not obey agglomeration, but it seems they do: • If p, then q • If p, then r • Therefore, if p, then (q and r). Back to the drawing board! But at least the drawing board is not empty— we have a theory that we can refine, rather than no theory at all.

Heuristics for philosophical creativity  303 Indeed, the literature on solving the parallel problem for the Lockean Thesis might stimulate a solution to the problem here. Inspired by Leitgeb (2016), we might require the conditional probability corresponding to a true indicative conditional not only to be high, but stably high: • P(C | A & B) > t for a suitable range of B. This is still sketchy—what is a “suitable range”? (Perhaps: those B that themselves have sufficiently high probability.) Anyway, I hope that what we have is far more promising than an empty box. Creativity is still required to complete the job—but less creativity than was required at the outset.

Contrastive stress ‘Taxonomise and colonise’ relies on making distinctions. Distinctions presuppose contrasts: this, rather than that. The rows and columns of a table reflect this—e.g., indicative conditionals, rather than counterfactuals; truthvalued conditionals, rather than non-truth-valued; and so on. Contrastive stress can be used to stimulate creativity, especially when generating and evaluating hypotheses. It draws attention to alternative members of a contrast class. Why does a flamingo stand on one leg?—Because if it didn’t, it would fall over. This joke works—to the limited extent that it does—because the question prompts us to assume one contrast class ({one leg, two legs}), while the answer subverts our assumption, and assumes another one ({one leg, no legs}). It may be a silly joke, but it reveals an important point about explanations: they are contrastive by nature. They are answers to questions that superficially may be of the form ‘Why p?’, but apparently their form is really ‘Why p rather than q?’, or perhaps some wider set of alternatives. (See van Fraassen 1980, Hitchcock 1996.) If stressing different parts of a sentence seems to change its meaning/ truth value, then that is evidence that something in the sentence is contrast-sensitive. This, in turn, is a device for determining the real structure of a concept. You can do this by mentally highlighting each word or phrase in a question or statement, and even intoning the words “rather than” or “as opposed to”, followed by members of the contrast class. Or you can italicise them in a written document over which you have editorial control, or literally highlight them (with highlighter pens) or underline them in one over which you don’t. Doing so encourages your mind to consider alternatives to the highlighted word or phrase. It is like running through different values of a variable. This makes it easier to discern which variables depend on which, and which variables are independent of which.

304  Alan Hájek Let’s try it. Consider: “Smoking a pack of cigarettes a day causes lung cancer”. Highlight “smoking”: smoking, rather than doing various alternative things with a pack of cigarettes—soaking, stoking, stroking…—a day causes lung cancer. It seems that there is no surprise there—smoking is what matters here.13 Now highlight “a”: “Smoking a pack …”—one pack, as opposed to other numbers of packs, like none, or two, or three, or … Hang on—if anything, relative to the latter alternatives, smoking (only) one pack a day seems to help prevent lung cancer. So the causal relation appears to be at least three-place: C (rather than C’) causes E.

See Hitchcock 1996

Causation is contrastive on the side of the cause. Or I should say: the cause. Emphasising that should prompt you to consider its obvious alternative: the effect. It should now be easier for a mental spark to jump: is causation also contrastive on the side of the effect? Consider: “Joe’s smoking a pack of cigarettes a day (rather than none) caused him to die in his eighties.” At first, this might sound odd—how can smoking cause Joe to live to ripe old age? But this sounds rather better: “Joe’s smoking a pack of cigarettes a day (rather than none) caused him to die in his eighties (rather than his nineties)”. It sounds better still if we imagine that Joe’s non-smoking siblings lived to their nineties; Joe lived only to his eighties. Thus, it looks like the causal relation is four-place: C (rather than C’) causes E (rather than E’).

See Schaffer 2005

Similarly, Schaffer (2008) uses contrastive stress considerations to argue that the knowledge relation is contrastive, a three-place relation rather than the two-place relation that it is standardly thought to be. Its form is: ‘S knows that p rather than q’. However, appropriately enough, we may use contrastive stress once again to prompt a concern with this very view. He uses contrastive stress considerations to argue that the knowledge relation— as opposed to various other relations—is contrastive. But it seems that one could use such considerations to argue that pretty much any relation is similarly contrastive, and has more relata than is standardly thought. We normally think that ‘S loves X’ is a two-place relation. But we say things like ‘Mary loves Sam rather than Bill’, suggesting that it is really three-place. (See Stalnaker 2004.) And why stop at three places, rather than four? See several other papers of Schaffer’s for further discussion and further examples of this heuristic at work.

Heuristics for philosophical creativity  305 We can apply the contrastive stress heuristic even to smaller lexical parts, such as prefixes and suffixes. Italicising (mentally or literally) parts of words can trigger productive associations. For example, various important arguments in philosophy concern disagreement—moral Twin Earth cases, relativism versus contextualism about the semantics for epistemic modals, etc. That’s: disagreement, as opposed to agreement. But it seems that the arguments would be just as powerful if they concerned agreement. Or again, philosophers often appeal to the method of supervaluations for analysing truth conditions—e.g., of sentences with vague terms. That’s: supervaluations, as opposed to subvaluations. One might ask whether subvaluations would do the job as well, or even better. More generally, the heuristic here, in the words of Gaut (2014: 285), is: “considering the contrary terms when analysing a concept (e.g., when analysing creativity, considering the contrary or purported contrary terms: being derivative, destructive, or imitative)”—and I would add, when analysing a philosophical thesis, or argument, or thought experiment, or paradox, and so on. Or better still: I just said “the heuristic”—suggesting one, as opposed to none or a plurality—when really we have a cluster of heuristics here. Indeed, one instance was “see definite descriptions in neon lights”. If you don’t have neon lights handy, italicising will do. More generally, see each key word in turn in neon lights; that should prompt you to run mentally through its contrast class, and to check what changes when you do. The heuristic helps one detect false dichotomies (and false trichotomies, and so on). It is also a good corrective to cognitive biases to which we are prone, and which may be obstacles to creativity—notably: • confirmation bias, the tendency to search for and to recall evidence that confirms, but not that disconfirms, one’s beliefs and hypotheses; and • congruence bias, the tendency to accept a belief or hypothesis without adequately testing alternative hypotheses.

“Turn the knobs” For a close variant of the last heuristic—or perhaps another way of conceiving of it—I am inspired by Dennett. His concern is mainly with thought experiments, or what he calls “intuition pumps”. He writes: “consider the intuition pump to be a tool with many settings, and “turn all the knobs” to see if the same intuitions get pumped when you consider variations” (2013: 7). Let’s say it another way. We speak of scientists performing controlled experiments, in which all independent variables are kept fixed except one target variable, which is varied; we then look to see how a putative dependent variable behaves. The idea is to isolate the contribution (or lack thereof) that the target variable makes. Philosophers often do

306  Alan Hájek something similar in thought experiments, in which we mentally perform such ­operations. The idea, more generally, is to compare cases that are alike in all respects but one. This allows us to isolate the contribution, if any, made by that one respect. See Dennett’s discussion of ‘turning’ various ‘knobs’ in Jackson’s (1982) famous ‘Mary’ thought experiment, the centrepiece of his argument against physicalism. Some of the ‘knobs’ may be tacit. For example, it goes without saying that Mary is a human. But we could say it explicitly, and start ‘turning the knob’ of other things she might be—for example, she is a human, as opposed to a supercomputer. But the heuristic is not just confined to thought experiments. Key terms in a philosophical thesis or argument will often involve variables that can take a number of values; mentally run through their values. This involves two steps: first, identifying the ‘knobs’—the variables; second, ‘turning’ them: running through their values. If they have too many values, perhaps infinitely many, run through a representative sample of them. This brings us back full circle to our ‘taxonomise and colonise’ heuristics. We may regard the rows of a table as different settings of a variable, and the columns as different settings of another. If certain row/column combinations must remain blank, this means that certain co-instantiations of these variables are impossible. This also segues to our next set of heuristics. Sometimes there will be a natural ordering, and perhaps even a metric, on the values of relevant variables. Some pairs of values, then, may be regarded as ‘nearby’—or as we might say, ‘analogous’…

Analogical reasoning Analogical reasoning plays centre stage in discussions of creativity. Its fruitfulness in science and mathematics is well documented (e.g., Bartha 2010, Tao 2006), and the psychological literature on analogical reasoning and creativity is huge (e.g., Holyoak and Thagard 1995). I can only gesture here at some aspects of analogical reasoning in connection with philosophical creativity. Analogical reasoning may play an important role in all of the phases of philosophical enquiry that I have identified. I have previously written (2014) about how analogies between space, time, and modality have been fruitfully deployed to generate problems and arguments. Similarly, there are analogies between rationality and morality that can be deployed at the various stages of philosophical enquiry. Continuity reasoning is also a kind of analogical reasoning: two things that are sufficiently similar with respect to some quantity or quality are often assumed to be similar along another, related quantity or quality. This is a fertile method for arguing that some target has a given property: this must be so, the reasoning goes, since things sufficiently

Heuristics for philosophical creativity  307 similar to the target have this property. The targets can be as diverse as actions, propositions, premises, and arguments, and the properties as diverse as being morally/rationally required, being possible, being true, and being sound. Continuity reasoning can be used at every stage of enquiry. I have also appealed to analogical reasoning at various points in this chapter—in recruiting heuristics for creativity (including analogical reasoning itself) that work well in other areas besides philosophy, in evaluating my proto-theory of indicative conditionals (by analogy to a problem for the Lockean Thesis), in refining it (by analogy to a refinement of the Lockean Thesis), and in suggesting the comparison of cases that are alike in all respects but one. Here is a heuristic for creativity at the problem-generation stage. Start with a familiar problem that is known to be fecund. Consider its general form, its key ingredients, and restate it at a higher level of abstraction, so that it is just a particular instance of that more general problem. Then, find further instances of that more general problem. This should generate analogous problems—which may also be fecund. For example, here is a fecund problem: the liar paradox. Start with: ‘This sentence is false’. If it is true, it is false; if it is false, it is true. What, then, are we to say about its truth-value? This problem has kept philosophers employed for millennia. The sentence attributes to itself a certain defect or undesirable feature: falsehood. But that is just one kind of defect that a sentence can have. At a higher level of abstraction, the form is: ‘This sentence is defective’. Now, there are many other ways of instantiating this form—many instances of what we might call ‘self-denigrating sentences’. Here are some: • This sentence is inconsistent. (Is it?) • This sentence is a truth-value glut (both true and false). (What is its truth status?) • This sentence is a truth-value gap (neither true nor false). (What is its truth status?) • This sentence is unassertable. (Is it?) • This sentence is unknowable. (Is it?) • This sentence cannot rationally be believed. (Should you believe it?) • This sentence is improbable. (How probable is it?) • This sentence is defective. (Is it? If so, how so?) To be sure, perhaps not all instances of the general form yield anything interesting. That’s fine; a heuristic may earn its keep if some of its outputs are fruitful. It is too much to expect all of its outputs to be fruitful; indeed, at that point calling it a ‘heuristic’ would be an understatement! While we’re thinking analogously, there are various paradoxes in the vicinity of the liar paradox—e.g. the strengthened liar (“this sentence is

308  Alan Hájek not true”), Curry’s paradox (“if this sentence is true, then 0 = 1” and its kin), and the truth-teller (“this sentence is true”). We could tweak various self-denigrating sentences along similar lines to give yet more paradoxical sentences. Paradoxes can often teach us lessons, and guide philosophical developments—that is, guide philosophical creativity. Analogical reasoning has played an important role in the history of philosophy—in Plato’s allegory of the cave in The Republic, Singer’s (1972) ‘drowning child’ argument for our obligation to help distant people in grave need, and so on. I will now present a classic dialectic in some detail, to illustrate how such reasoning may be employed at several stages of philosophical enquiry. The argument from design is one of philosophy’s most important arguments for theism. Actually, ‘the’ is infelicitous, as there are various such arguments. (Neon lights!) Paley’s (1802) original formulation is just one, and different formulations require different responses. Consider this version. We look at a watch, and we see that it is complex, orderly, and aesthetically pleasing; we know it had a designer. Then we look at the world, and we see that it is complex, orderly, and aesthetically pleasing; we conclude that it had a designer—namely, God. Therefore, God exists. Analogical reasoning was used to produce this argument; now, let’s use such reasoning to evaluate it. Consider this response (inspired by Hume 1779), which parodies it. We look at a watch, and we see that it is complex, orderly, and aesthetically pleasing; and we know that it was designed by a bunch of people in the last decade or so. Then we look at the world, and we see that it is complex, orderly, and aesthetically pleasing; we conclude that it was designed by a bunch of people in the last decade or so. Of course, that’s absurd. We have ‘proven too much’: by parallel reasoning to the argument with which we started, we have reached an obviously false conclusion. We have just seen two examples of analogical reasoning. We want to argue that a certain thing, x, has a certain property, F. We consider some other thing, y, which clearly is F. Moreover, y and x share other properties, G, H, I, etc. We conclude that they share the further property F—that is, x is F. In short: x is like y, and y is F; therefore, x is F. We have here two fecund heuristics for creativity: one positive, and one negative, as we might say. The first is a strategy for fashioning an argument in the first place; the second is a strategy for objecting to an existing argument: the ‘proves too much’, or ‘parity of reasoning’ strategy. We might call it ‘parody of reasoning’: one parodies the reasoning given in the original argument.14 I have mentioned several classic arguments of the first kind. The ‘proves too much’ strategy is also time-honoured. Gaunilo employed it in his ‘perfect island’ parody of the ontological argument for God’s existence; Diderot employed it in his ‘many Gods objection’ to Pascal’s Wager. It is captured by the medieval adage ‘Quod nimis probat, nihil

Heuristics for philosophical creativity  309 probat’: ‘what proves too much, proves nothing’. (A heuristic for getting attention for a view of yours: state it with a catchy slogan; a heuristic for making it sound scholarly: state it in Latin.) Suppose that you are evaluating a particular argument. You think that there is something wrong with the argument, but you cannot put your finger on just what it is. The ‘proves too much’ heuristic may be just the trick. Remember the ‘try reductio ad absurdum’ heuristic. The ‘proves too much’ heuristic is similar (there’s another analogy for you!): parallel reasoning yields absurdity. But we are not yet done. So far, I have approved of ‘proves too much’ reasoning; I must not approve too much. Our parody of our initial argument from design exploited the fact that there are important disanalogies between the watch and the world—notably, we know that unlike the watch, the world did not have a bunch of designers who designed it in the last decade or so. But similarly—dare I say analogously?—we know that our initial argument A and the obviously unsound parody of it U are unlike each other in at least one important respect: U is obviously unsound, while A is not. Indeed, there may be a simple explanation of why it is not—namely, it is sound! If we are not careful, our ‘proves too much’ strategy will not only ‘prove’ that A is unsound; it will ‘prove’ that A is obviously unsound, which it is not. ‘Proves too much’ proves too much! The ‘proves too much’ strategy cautioned us that analogical reasoning must be handled with care: taken too far, it could be used in support of an absurd conclusion about the world’s creation. But the strategy must heed its own caution. It is, after all, itself a form of analogical reasoning; it too must be handled with care. Notice that I have now used analogical reasoning for the third time, ascending to the meta-level to evaluate ‘proves too much reasoning’, which is itself a heuristic for evaluating other arguments—including analogical arguments such as the argument from design! And I have displayed the self-referentiality heuristic in action: giving the ‘proves too much’ strategy itself a taste of its own medicine. It is not enough merely to pile on properties (F, G, H, …) that are shared by our target (x) and its source (y). They must be relevant properties, properties of the right kind—often ones with suitable law-like or causal connections between them. But even that hand-waving characterisation does not do justice to analogical reasoning in mathematics and much of philosophy—for example, it does not help us distinguish the good and bad instances of ‘proves too much’ reasoning. We are often adept at identifying good instances of analogical reasoning, though the fact that philosophers often disagree in their evaluations of analogical arguments suggests that we could be better. We certainly don’t agree on a theory of what distinguishes the good from the bad, and I don’t have heuristics for that. Philosophical noûs won’t be supplanted any time soon.

310  Alan Hájek

Conclusion I have offered a number of heuristics that I submit can enhance philosophical creativity. (I would be happy if they enhanced any aspect of philosophising; but better still for my present purposes if they enhance the creative aspect.) I don’t claim that they can enhance everyone’s philosophical creativity; some native cunning is needed also. But they will serve their purpose if, thanks to them, less native cunning is needed in order to achieve some worthwhile philosophical outputs. Now, perhaps you can do better. Perhaps you can offer other heuristics that are more fertile, more conducive to philosophical creativity, than mine. Perhaps you are inspired by the psychological literature on creativity; perhaps you are inspired by heuristics that enhance creativity in other domains; or perhaps you are just inspired, and lightning strikes you when coming up with them. If so, more power to my thesis that there are such heuristics, and more silencing of the sceptical voices that I countenanced at the outset. Share your heuristics with the world, and watch for further lightning strikes! Now, if you are a genius, more power to you—we should get out of your way. Very well, then; you may have no need for such heuristics. Then again, even you may benefit from them. In a comment on Richard Feynman’s use of thinking tools, Dennett writes: “No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available” (2013: 3). And Feynman was especially adept at coming up with smart heuristics. In coming up with the heuristics that I have, I tacitly used what we might call heuristics for generating heuristics. I have tried my best to be creative in the heuristics for creativity that I have come up with. (Self-referentiality strikes again!) I looked at other areas, like chess, mathematics, and writing, which clearly have heuristics. Reasoning analogically—one of the primary drivers of creativity—I wondered: are there heuristics for philosophical creativity? I then offered some hypotheses about how such creativity could be cultivated by heuristics, drawing on further analogies to heuristics for creativity in those areas and elsewhere, and I refined them somewhat. These hypotheses are before you. Now I invite you to evaluate them, and perhaps refine them further.

Notes 1 Many thanks to Paul Bartha, Brian Garrett, Berys Gaut, Renée Hájek, Yoaav Isaacs, Leon Leontyev, Hanti Lin, Aidan Lyon, Sumeet Patwardhan, Philip Pettit, Ren-Jun Wang, Shang Long Yeo, Jing Yuan, audiences at Chong Cheng University, and the 2017 Philosophy Mountain Workshop, and especially David Plunkett, Daniel Stoljar, and Michael Titelbaum, for helpful comments and discussion. 2 See Gaut (2014) for an excellent presentation and rebuttal of such arguments.

Heuristics for philosophical creativity  311 3 I entertain the notion of ‘genius’, partly because doing so allows me to present succinctly the opposing view to mine that is my foil. And there is no question that there have been and are exceptionally creative people, whom we might describe that way. But I want to resist here the thought that their achievements must be due primarily to innate talent. Indeed, in some cases, their success might partially be due to their being unusually good at internalising especially productive heuristics! 4 The St. Petersburg game is a gamble that has infinite expected value—there are unboundedly many references to it on the web. 5 Wenzel (this volume) makes a parallel observation about the use of rules in mathematics. 6 William S. Burroughs and David Bowie also famously used the closely related ‘cut-up technique’ of taking a finished text, cutting it into pieces, and rearranging them to create new texts. The philosophical technique that follows doesn’t begin with a finished text, so it’s more like Magnetic Poetry. 7 Adams’ Thesis is that the assertability of ‘if A, then B’, goes by the conditional probability P(B|A). 8 McGee writes that “[i]t is not so easy to test whether the rule is valid for the subjunctive conditional, since we seldom use the subjunctive conditional in situations in which we are confident that the antecedent is true” (466). That is a fair point, although there is a large literature on such conditionals, going back to Anderson (1951), and I think that our intuitions are fairly robust in cases like these. 9 Thanks here to David Plunkett. 10 Thanks here to Shang Long Yeo. 11 Grice (1989), Adams (1998), Stalnaker (1968), Lewis (1973), Leitgeb (2016), Edgington (2008). 12 Levi (1996). 13 But suppose our list of alternatives includes lacing it with asbestos fibres (which are known to cause lung cancer). Now it is not so clear that smoking, rather than that, causes cancer. 14 I owe this nice phrase to Dennett, although I do not mean the same thing as he does by it.

References Adams, E. (1998) A Primer of Probability Logic, Stanford, CA: CSLI, Stanford University. Anderson, A.R. (1951) “A Note on Subjunctive and Counterfactual Conditionals,” Analysis 11, 35–38. Anderson, L. (ed.) (2006) Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings, London: Routledge. Baggini, J. and P. Fosl (2003) The Philosopher’s Toolkit, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Bartha, P.F.A. (2010) By Parallel Reasoning: The Construction and Evaluation of Analogical Arguments, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chalmers, D.J. (2012) Constructing the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dennett, D. (2013) Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Edgington, D. (2008) “Counterfactuals,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society CVIII, Part I, 1–21. van Fraassen, B. (1980) The Scientific Image, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gaut, B. (2014) “Educating for Creativity,” in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, eds. E. Paul and. S. B. Kaufman, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grice, H.P. (1989) Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

312  Alan Hájek Hájek, A. (2014) “Heuristics for Philosophical Creativity,” in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, eds. E. Paul and. S. B. Kaufman, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hájek, A. (2016) “Philosophical Heuristics and Philosophical Methodology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, eds. H. Cappelen, T.S. Gendler, and J. Hawthorne, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hartman, J. (2015) Philosophical Heuristics, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Hitchcock, C. (1996) “The Role of Contrast in Causal and Explanatory Claims,” Synthese 107:3, 395–419. Hume, D. (1779) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, London. Holyoak, K.J. and P. Thagard (1995) Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Jackson, F. (1982) “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” The Philosophical Quarterly 32, 127–136. Leitgeb, H. (2016) The Stability of Belief: How Rational Belief Coheres with Probability, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levi, I. (1996) For the Sake of the Argument, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, D. (1973) Counterfactuals, Oxford: Blackwell. Lewis, D. (1986) Philosophical Papers, Volume II, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGee, V. (1985) “A Counterexample to Modus Ponens,” The Journal of Philosophy 82, 462–470. Nozick, R. (1993) The Nature of Rationality, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Paley, W. (1802) Natural Theology, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. Pólya, G. (1957) How to Solve It, 2nd ed., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sawyer, R.K. (2006) Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schaffer, J. (2005) “Contrastive Causation,” Philosophical Review 114:3, 327–58. Schaffer, J. (2008) “The Contrast-Sensitivity of Knowledge Ascriptions,” Social Epistemology 22:3, 253–245. Singer, P. (1972) “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1:3, 229–243. Stalnaker, R. (1968) “A Theory of Conditionals,” in Studies in Logical Theory, ed. N. Rescher, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 98–112. Stalnaker, R. (2004) “Comments on ‘From Contextualism to Contrastivism’”, Philosophical Studies 119, 105–17. Stokes, P.D. (2006) Creativity from Constraints: The Psychology of Breakthrough, New York: Springer Publishing Company. Tao, T. (2006) Solving Mathematical Problems: A Personal Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ward, T.B. and Y. Kolomyts (2010) “Cognition and Creativity,” in J.C. Kaufman and R.J. Sternberg (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

18 The art of doing mathematics Christian Helmut Wenzel

Mathematicians often say that their theorems, proofs, and theories can be beautiful. They say mathematics can be like art. They know how to move creatively and freely in their domains. But ordinary people usually cannot do this and do not share this view. They often have unpleasant memories from school and do not have this experience of freedom and creativity in doing mathematics. I myself have been a mathematician, and I wish to highlight some of the creative aspects in doing mathematics. I always had the feeling that there is much freedom in mathematics and that one can do as one pleases as long as one avoids contradictions (and one can even live with contradictions for a while). In mathematics, one only needs to define something and there it is! Just imagine it, and it immediately exists. Where else, besides fiction, does one have such power? This chapter has three parts. In the first, I lay out some historical facts and views that I will need later. Second, I insert an interlude with Kant, pointing out some of his claims and insights in aesthetics, and some aspects in mathematics that I think he overlooked or underestimated. Third, I will bring out some aspects of higher mathematics that I will show are similar to art. These aspects are in the doing and creating of mathematics, not in the finished theories. They are usually not found in textbooks. I want to show that a researcher in mathematics is like a painter or composer, exploring and creating. To see this, one has to adopt a firstperson perspective. In this way I will show that aesthetics plays a role and leaves its traces also in mathematics.

1  Views from history We don’t find mathematical theorems and proofs in a museum. We do not hang them on walls for contemplation as we do with paintings, or put them up like a sculpture to decorate a building. Nor do we perform them in concert halls as we perform string quartets and operas. It is true that professional mathematicians go to conferences and present their newest ideas to other mathematicians, but such “performances” are not of interest to the general public, who simply lack the necessary background.

314  Christian Helmut Wenzel The general public does not understand the newest research and cannot appreciate such presentations. Going to a museum to look at paintings is easier. And, even for professional mathematicians, there is a difference in comparison with the arts. Once new theorems and proofs are known, they will not be presented in conferences any more. They will become part of the history of mathematics. They find their ways into textbooks, where they are presented in more reader-friendly ways. Students then have to learn the theorems and proofs and usually do not feel the freedom of creation and contemplation anymore, because the proofs are elegant and polished and the students often do not have the time or ability to work them out themselves. Both mathematics and the arts are taught in school, but there is always a difference between the two. In mathematics, the teacher always knows the answer and there is only one answer that is correct. At least, this is the impression many pupils get. A proof is either right or wrong. Whereas in the arts, each student produces something unique that is neither right nor wrong but a matter of taste and allows for different perspectives and opinions. Seen this way, mathematics is very different from the arts. Certainly, such differences exist. But things change if we look at mathematics in the first-person perspective, from the point of view of a researcher who is actually doing mathematics or anyone who tries to solve a mathematical puzzle without following routine methods as they are taught in textbooks. In fact, most questions in mathematics do not have an answer at all. The impression one gets from school and textbooks, that everything is fixed and that the teacher knows it all, is simply wrong. This will become clearer in the course of this chapter, especially in the third part. For the Ancient Greeks, mathematics was geometry. They admired the regular movements of the heavenly bodies. To them, the world was beautiful: they thought of it as a “cosmos,” meaning not only “the world” but also “beauty.” The world was filled with harmony and built on geometry. Musical harmony is based on geometric relations, the lengths of a vibrating string, and the relationships of such lengths. It is always the relationships between parts and whole that matter, and such relationships are essentially mathematical. Aesthetic perspectives of this kind were present among the early philosophers and mathematicians such as Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, and Euclid. Even the proportion of a tragedy and its composition follows mathematical relations. Thus, aesthetics and mathematics were inseparably part of a harmonic world-view (see for instance Aristotle, Metaphysics I, 5, 985b-987a, or Plotnitzky 1998). But the Greeks also knew of moments of disharmony and chaos in mathematics and in the “cosmic” world. They knew that the square root of 2 is an “irrational” number. Expressed in their language and way of thinking this means they knew that in any given square the side and the diagonal

The art of doing mathematics  315 cannot be measured by a common unit. They are not “­ commensurable.” There is no unitary length L, no matter how small, such that the side is n times L and the diagonal is m times L for some “natural” numbers n and m (taken from the set 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.). The side and the diagonal are always “incommensurable.” The Greeks knew a geometric proof for this. In modern algebra one says, equivalently, that the square root of 2 cannot be expressed as the ratio a/b with natural numbers a and b. It is not a “rational” number but an “irrational” one (see Aristotle, Prior Analytics I, 23, 41a 23–30; Boyer 1968, 79–80; von Fritz 1945). If one thinks that the world is intrinsically mathematical, as the Greeks did, such incommensurability creates a problem, an aspect of disharmony and chaos. The Greeks even tell the story of a mathematician who discovered this fact and later made a journey on a ship, the ship sank, and he drowned. The story goes that the Gods punished him for his discovery (see Heath 1921, 154; von Fritz 1945, 244). An even more problematic case of incommensurability is the circumference of a circle in relation to the radius. If we take the radius as unit of length 1, then the circumference will have length 2π, with π = 3.141592653589793… . As with the square root of 2, a decimal representation does not come to an end. The Greeks did know many things about π, but they did not know that it is an irrational number (that it cannot be represented as a/b). A proof of its irrationality was first given in the eighteenth century by Johann Heinrich Lambert. The number π is more problematic than the square root of 2, because the latter is the solution of the simple equation x2-2=0, whereas for π there is no such equation. There is no polynomial equation anxn+an-1x n-1+an-2n-2+... +a1x+a0=0 such that π would be a solution of this equation (with the ai being natural numbers such as 1, 2, 3…). Today we say that √2 is an “irrational” but at least an “algebraic” number, whereas π is neither rational nor algebraic. (An algebraic number is a solution of such a polynomial equation.) This might sound merely technical and of little relevance, but seen in another light it assumes a very strange and “irrational” aspect of “ineffability.” All numbers considered so far can be seen as points along a line on which one point is marked as 0 and another as 1. On that line we can find all the rational numbers a/b as well as π and √2. Now there are certainly infinitely many points on this line. We call all these points (numbers) the “real numbers.” But how many are “infinitely many”? We will see that a strange problem arises here. There are the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc. They are on the line, and they are infinitely many. But they are countable. They are “countably many.” (We just counted them.) Then there are the “rational” numbers a/b (with a and b natural numbers 1, 2, 3, …). These are also countably many. (There is a way of systematically counting all of them.) They are also on that line. Then there are the solutions of polynomial

316  Christian Helmut Wenzel equations, such as √2. Our set is getting bigger. But even these are still countably many, and π is still not among them. (It is not an “algebraic number.”) The number π is indeed special, and such special numbers are hard to find. They are difficult to get hold of. They are difficult to describe. The surprising fact is that most points on the line are of this type. Most points along the line (the real numbers) are not algebraic numbers. By “most” I mean the following: In mathematical ‘measure theory’ one arrives at the statement that the set of algebraic numbers is tiny and negligible in comparison with the set of non-algebraic numbers (the strange ones). In any unit interval (say the interval between 0 and 1, having weight one in measure theory), all the algebraic numbers in that interval (including for instance all the infinitely many fractions a/b) put together have weight 0, whereas the strange and “ineffable” ones in that interval have weight 1. They are almost everything. The expression “ineffable” is not from mathematics. I call them “ineffable,” because they are difficult to find and difficult to describe in the following sense. All letters in the alphabet and all words and sentences are countable (because there are systematic ways of giving each sentence another number). Hence, the numbers that are definable (effable) in words are countable. They are countably many. But, surprisingly, all those numbers together are “nothing” (in weight or volume, according to measure theory) in comparison with the “ineffable” ones. If one picks at random a real number (a point) from the line, the probability that it will be an ineffable (non-algebraic) one is 1; whereas the probability that it be an effable (algebraic) one is 0. This is surprising and in turn casts a strange light on randomness. Maybe it is not so easy to pick a real number “at random.” Maybe the real numbers are not that “real” at all. Another way of understanding the real numbers is as follows. One can construct them in the following three-step way. One starts with the rational numbers, considers all infinite sequences of such rational numbers that converge in a certain sense (Cauchy sequences), and then one forms equivalent classes (sequences that converge to the same limit). There will be infinitely many such equivalent classes of sequences, in fact, uncountably many, and the real numbers can be defined as being these classes (limits). This is rather complicated, and since the sequences are infinite, one can wonder how “real” the real numbers are. The idea is that all real numbers can be approximated by sequences of rational numbers, and identified with (equivalence classes of) such sequences. The decimal representations of √2 and π are in effect nothing but such infinite sequences. A further extension of the real numbers is the set of complex numbers, which can be represented in a plane. When they were first suggested, discovered, or invented, the mathematical community at first did not easily accept them as numbers at all. They appeared even less “real.”

The art of doing mathematics  317 Above, I mentioned the idea of “randomly” picking a real number. This was just an idea. But in quantum physics we encounter randomness in nature, random events such as the decay of radioactive elements. We know that such elements decay with a certain probability, but we cannot predict the exact time of decay. According to quantum theory, this unpredictability is ontological and not merely epistemological. It is not a matter of our limited insight. If we came up with a prediction, there would be a contradiction in our theory. Today we see that there is more “irrationality” and chaos in the cosmos than the Ancient Greeks were aware of. James Joyce in Finnegans Wake speaks of “chaosmos” (Finnegans Wake 1.5.118, see also Plotnitzky 1998). Kepler, Newton, and Galileo introduced more mathematics into the natural sciences. In the eighteenth century, Kant still believed in an ordered world according to laws of nature. With Nietzsche and the nineteenth century things changed, and in the beginning of the twentieth century we encounter disturbances also in the sciences. Classical physics turned into quantum physics and in 1931 mathematics itself lost its firm ground with the discovery and introduction of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Hilbert’s dream of completeness in mathematical knowledge was over. We woke up to a reality of incompleteness. Today we have learned to live with incompleteness and plurality, not only in literature and the arts, with Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Joyce, and Duchamp, but also in mathematics and physics. According to quantum mechanics, there are ontological uncertainties that cannot be resolved. The world itself has turned out to be more (objectively) indeterminate and complex than we had thought before. Although our desire for symmetry, harmony, and unity still remains, at the same time plurality grew. In mathematics, there are now many different disciplines, such as arithmetic, geometry, algebra, number theory, algebraic geometry, algebraic topology, algebraic number theory, numerical analysis, set theory, category theory, etc. These theories allow for new interconnections and new possibilities of creativity. There is something like “affordance” in mathematics, and new affordances have been created. (The term “affordance” was introduces by the psychologist James J. Gibson in 1977. Affordances are “action possibilities” that are latent in the environment. For us a door knob affords turning, a cord affords pulling, and steps afford climbing.) With more complex mathematical theories around, we encounter more things we can do within mathematics itself. There are more possibilities of coming up with interconnections. Descartes for instance introduced the “Cartesian” coordinate system and thereby introduced arithmetic into geometry and geometry into arithmetic. He created new possibilities of translation within mathematics and he changed the face of mathematics itself. Galois connected geometry,

318  Christian Helmut Wenzel arithmetic, and algebra in novel ways by solving problems of geometry and arithmetic by means of algebraic methods. He answered questions such as: Which regular figures can be constructed by ruler and compass? Why can we not trisect an angle by means of ruler and compass? Why is there no formula for finding the solutions of a polynomial equation of degree five? And he found the answers to these questions from geometry and arithmetic by translating them into questions in group theory and algebraic extension theory. In the twentieth century, algebraic geometry has turned out to be the most powerful mathematical theory. The name already shows that it is a hybrid, combining algebra and geometry. Fermat for instance has formulated a question in the seventeenth century that remained without an answer for a long time. He asked for a proof of the statement that the equation an+bn=cn has no solution for n>2 and a, b, c natural numbers 1, 2, 3, … A very complicated proof was given in 1994 by using algebraic geometry (and other disciplines of mathematics). The plurality of disciplines within mathematics is reflected in the French expression for mathematics: Les mathématiques, with an “s” at the end, and in British English in “maths.” This plurality adds to the possibilities of creation in mathematics. It has created new affordances.

2  An interlude with Kant Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft) appeared in 1790. In this work Kant analzses judgments of taste and makes various observations about art and genius. He also compares mathematics with the arts and says that mathematics cannot be beautiful and that there cannot be any genius in mathematics. (When Kant was younger he took the opposite and more standard view.) I think Kant in his Critique overdid some distinctions and he missed an opportunity to apply his own aesthetics to mathematics and the mathematical sciences. I will show that one can successfully do this if one focuses on the process of doing mathematics instead of mathematical results. One can observe such processes particularly well in researchers, or children, or anyone who tries to solve a problem in non-routine ways. I believe Kant missed this opportunity because he concentrated too much on elementary and simple examples such as drawing a line or calculating 5+7=12. Maybe he also wanted to protect mathematics and the mathematical sciences from the aesthetic small talk of his day that he thought to be full of vanity and that he therefore did not like. In any case, differently from Hegel for instance, Kant did not venture into higher mathematics. It is here, in higher mathematics, that one can more easily see the creative and aesthetic aspects of (doing) mathematics. Kant did not realize

The art of doing mathematics  319 that his own theory allows one to better understand the phenomenology of creatively and searchingly doing mathematics. The same applies to his theory of genius, which he wrongly restricted to the fine arts. Introducing Kant’s aesthetics at this point of the chapter serves us in two respects. It provides us with useful tools to analyse the phenomenology of doing mathematics, and it allows us to reveal mistaken assumptions about the nature of mathematics, namely that it is all fixed and nothing but rules. In this context, we also have the chance to cast a new light on the nature of rules in general and how they are used in mathematics in particular. Here, I quote a longer passage from Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment that I will analyze and criticize in what follows (boldface highlighting mine): § 47. Elucidation and confirmation of the above explanation of genius. Everyone agrees that genius is entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation. Now since learning is nothing but imitation, even the greatest aptitude for learning, facility for learning (capacity) as such, still does not count as genius. But even if one thinks or writes for himself, and does not merely take up what others have thought, indeed even if he invents a great deal for art and science, this is still not a proper reason for calling such a great mind (in contrast to someone who, because he can never do more than merely learn and imitate, is called a block-head) a genius, since just this sort of thing could also have been learned, and thus still lies on the natural path of inquiry and reflection in accordance with rules [weil eben das auch hätte können gelernt werden, also doch auf dem natürlichen Wege des Forschens und Nachdenkens liegt ], and is not specifically distinct from that which can be acquired with effort by means of imitation. Thus everything that Newton expounded [vorgetragen hat ] in his immortal work on the principles of natural philosophy, no matter how great a mind it took to discover it [dergleichen zu erfinden], can still be learned [kann man gar wohl lernen]; but one cannot learn to write inspired poetry, however exhaustive all the rules for the art of poetry and however excellent the models [Muster ] for it may be. The reason is that Newton could make all the steps that he had to take [alle seine Schritte, die er … zu tun hatte], from the first elements of geometry to his great and profound discoveries, entirely intuitive [ganz anschaulich vormachen konnte] not only to himself but also to everyone else, and thus set them out for posterity quite determinately; but no Homer or Wieland [a famous writer of his time, contemporary of Kant and Goethe] can indicate how his ideas, which are fantastic [phantasiereich] and yet at the same time rich in thought [ gedankenvoll ], arise and come together in his head [in seinem Kopf hervor und zusammen finden], because he himself does not know it and thus cannot teach it to anyone else either. In the scientific sphere, therefore, the greatest

320  Christian Helmut Wenzel discoverer differs only in degree from the most hard-working imitator and apprentice, whereas he differs in kind from someone who is gifted by nature for beautiful art. Kant 2000, vol.5: 309

Kant claims that in mathematics one can “make” everything “entirely intuitive” (ganz anschaulich vormachen kann), so that others can “follow it” (zur Nachfolge bestimmt – Guyer and Matthews translate “set … out for posterity quite determinately”). He says Newton could make “all his steps” intuitive and that he “had to take” them. But is this true? What exactly are “steps” in this context? If someone presents me with a proof and says: “Look, now we use formula 3 above and set x=17 here in this equation!” then in some sense I can “follow” him, or her, and understand. I know how to use formula 3 and I know what it means to set x=17. I know how to do it, and I know that it is allowed. In that sense I can “follow” the steps. But if the writer Wieland had told me: “Now look, here I write such and such,” then I could follow that, too. The question is why one should go on with these words and not with any other words. Similarly we can ask Newton why we should use that formula and not any other (there are many) and why we should set x=17 and not x=18 or any other number (there are many other numbers, more than countably many other real numbers). But this is not the way Kant presents it. He does not question and further analyze what exactly the taking of steps and the following of steps consist in. There are guidelines such as the suggestion that a shorter proof is preferable to a longer one, the rule that contradictions must be avoided, or that one should (usually) stay within a given system of axioms. But still, this leaves more room and freedom than many suppose. Maybe there are more real numbers than there are atoms in the universe (if the universe consists of elements of a minimal size and is not infinite in extension). There certainly are more real numbers than words and sentences that will ever be uttered in English (countably many). There are also more than Wieland could possibly have come up with in German (countably many). If we ask Newton “Why 17?,” he will be hard pressed. He will not be able to make this “intuitive” (anschaulich). He could say: “Just be patient! Follow me and in the end you will see that this leads to the desired result.” This would be true. But this is not the same as making intuitive why he “had” to take these steps [alle seine Schritte, die er … zu tun hatte]. In fact, this cannot be made intuitive, because it is wrong! It is wrong, because theorems have different proofs and hence there is no such necessity of steps. Other proofs and other steps are possible. One does not have to do what Newton did. Leibniz, for instance, did things altogether differently. He took very different steps. Today we give different proofs from the ones that were given then. Many roads lead to Rome. Here, we see the plurality

The art of doing mathematics  321 of theories and the uncountability (ineffability) of objects playing out. The mathematical universe is larger than it might appear at first blush. If we set x=17, then such and such will necessarily happen (the equation will turn into this one). But if we don’t set x=17, then this will not happen at all. The necessity is in the if-then relationship, and indeed we do not find this kind of logical necessity in painting and poetry. But we should also notice that there is no such necessity in the choosing itself (setting x=17). There are no mathematical rules for when to set what for what. There are no rules for when to apply which formula. And that is why it is so hard to find proofs. Kant writes that “no Homer or Wieland can indicate how his ideas, which are fantastic and yet at the same time rich in thought, arise and come together in his head.” That sounds convincing. But does it not apply to Newton as well? Also he cannot “indicate” (anzeigen) how his ideas “come together in his head.” Mathematicians sometimes get their ideas while sleeping. Newton can only show that they lead to the desired result. Again, these ideas and steps are not the only possible ones. Kant speaks of a “natural path of inquiry and reflection in accordance with rules.” But is there such a thing as a “natural path” in mathematics? He even speaks of “the” natural path (auf dem natürlichen Wege), as if there were only one. We have already seen that many paths and many proofs are possible. And what exactly is meant by “natural path”? If it is not the sequence of steps in a proof, is it the mathematical method Kant has in mind? But what would that be? Proofs have changed, theories have developed, and so have mathematical methods. Or does he think the whole development and history of mathematics is such a natural path and is predetermined? Now we get into deep waters of determinism, physical, cultural, or mathematical. It is not clear at all what “the natural path of inquiry and reflection” could possibly be. I do not think there is such a thing. There are many theories, infinitely many objects, and even more than countably-many infinitely many objects (the rational numbers are countably many, but the real numbers are uncountably many, they are in a certain sense beyond description and ineffable). When a teacher shows us a proof, or when we follow a proof in a textbook, we are often impressed and do not come up with a better one. We tend to think this proof must be “the” proof and the only one. But it is creative minds that later see an alternative and come up with an altogether different route. They see things differently and develop new methods. We are usually not such geniuses, but this does not change the fact that not everything is fixed and follows from rules. Things do not really follow from rules at all, because the rules do not say when and how they should be applied. Rules do not speak. There are no rules for when and how to apply them, and this creates a kind of freedom in mathematics that people

322  Christian Helmut Wenzel are usually not aware of. I do not want to claim that there are as many possible proofs of a given theorem as there are possible paintings of a given vase or mountain. That would go too far. But there is more than one, and the theorem is not just given but also part of a larger theory that has been created. Kant already in his first Critique knew the regress problem when asking for rules for when to apply rules. He said that concepts (rules) somehow come with “marks” that regulate their application, and that we should not think of these marks as rules again if we want to avoid an infinite regress. He was keenly aware of this. But I think he underestimated the dynamics and openness that this creates. I am not so much thinking of Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem here, which goes much deeper, but more simply about the fact that there is more than one rule in the game and that each rule can be (usually unambiguously – here is the difference to Wittgenstein) applied to many different objects. Kant writes that there is a “natural path of inquiry and reflection in accordance with rules.” But the expression “in accordance with rules” (nach Regeln) is vague and ambiguous. Formula 3 in our proof is a rule, and we may say that we proceed “in accordance” with it. But our choosing the formula (and not another one) is not part of this. The formula does not speak to us and say: “use me now!” We have inspirations and ideas that come to us as if from somewhere else (in German one speaks of “Einfälle”). They come, but others might have come instead. Mathematics allows for other possibilities. We may use formula 3 at this point, because we are allowed to do so. There is a rule of permission, and we can say that we use a formula “in accordance” with such a rule. But I do not think Kant had such rules in mind, and in any case such rules do not determine the way the proof goes. They only create possibilities and affordances, and at each step there are infinitely many such possibilities. A proof has many steps and thus the possibilities multiply and create a vast open space. This is why proofs are hard to find and why I think we have, contrary to what Kant claims, the right to speak of geniuses in mathematics as well and not just in the fine arts. In lecture notes of Kant’s students we read the following: “Matters of genius cannot be learned according to rules. Mathematics and philosophy are not matters of genius. Mathematics can be learned” (Sachen des Genies sind, die nicht nach Regeln gelernt werden. Mathematik und Philosophie sind nicht Sachen des Genies. Die Mathematik kann erlernt werden.” Anthropology Lecture Notes Mrongovius 1784/85, AA XXV 1311, translation mine). But what “according to rules” means is not said. We have seen that it is problematic. Similarly we read: “If I derive rules from rules that are already known, then this is talent and not genius” (Wenn ich aus bekannten Regeln

The art of doing mathematics  323 andre herausziehe; so ist das Talent aber nicht Genie. AA XXV 1310). But how do we “derive” rules from other rules? In deductive reasoning there are always choices made, comparable to choosing to apply formula 3 and to choosing to set x=17. The choices are part of the process of deriving new results, but the choices themselves are not derived (herausgezogen). The choices are merely permitted, not determined. In the Nachlass we find the following note by Kant: “Mathematics by itself is nothing but rules” (Die mathematic ist an sich selbst lauter Regel, Refl. 922, AA XV 410, Kant’s orthography). But does Euclidean geometry consist only of axioms and postulates? Does the rest, all the theorems that follow, come by itself ? Things are more complicated than what these remarks by Kant suggest. The creativity lies in what we can do with these rules, and it is here that we can see similarities with what artists do. There are rules of composition in music. But from there it is a long way to a French Suite by Bach. What does Kant say about genius in his third Critique? In section 46, preceding the one from which I have taken the long quote above, Kant writes: “Genius is the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art. Since the talent, as an inborn productive faculty of the artist, itself belongs to nature, this could also be expressed thus: Genius is the inborn predisposition of the mind (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art” (Kant 1902, vol. 5: 307). If we take “rule” in a wider sense including style, insight, and exemplarity, this explanation of what a genius is applies also to mathematics. Also here we find style, insight, and exemplarity. As Monet and Picasso have introduced impressionism and cubism, so Descartes has introduced the Cartesian coordinate system and Galois has introduced methods from algebra into arithmetic and geometry. Descartes and Galois have changed the face of mathematics. Kant says that it is nature that “gives the rule to art” and by that he means that other artists take the artworks produced by geniuses as models and exemplars which they imitate and follow. They use them as sources for new inspiration. The same can be said about mathematics, which has its histories, developments, and sudden bents and breaks. Mathematical geniuses give rules (styles, insights, methods, whole theories) to mathematics. Somewhat metaphorically, Kant says that it is “through” genius that “nature gives rules to art.” A genius him- or herself does not know how it happens and where the ideas come from. But as we have seen, also a mathematical genius cannot say that. Equally metaphorically, we can say that nature “gives rules” to mathematics. As holds for artists, genius is an “inborn mental disposition” in mathematical geniuses. In fact, Kant’s theory of judgments of taste applies quite well to geniuses in mathematics, as I will now show in the following part.

324  Christian Helmut Wenzel

3  Portrait of a mathematician as an artist How do mathematicians work when they do their research? What is going on in their minds and what do they experience? I myself have been working in algebraic geometry and according to my experience one does not so much think about general rules than about particular examples. One goes by what one is familiar with, examples one has been working with for a long time. One takes them as exemplars and models. Mathematicians have their hobbyhorses. According to Henry Poincaré, there are two types of mathematicians: those who work conceptual-analytically, and those who work intuitive-geometrically (Poincaré 1905: 27). I am of the second type. I have always needed to see something, be it a figure or a diagram. I always used a model and a special case, an exemplar of some kind to illustrate what happens in general. Such a model can be abstract, but it would not be a general rule itself. It has a certain plasticity that allows one to manipulate and vary certain aspects that one is interested in. This, I think, is important. One can add or drop something here and there and then see what happens. Such changes one perceives immediately, faster than one would be able to calculate or reason deductively. One intuitively guesses what happens, and such guessing is not blind, because the figures and models one has in mind always reflect important properties. Such changing perspectives and varying features of the object itself often introduce vagueness and fogginess. But such vagueness is often welcome, because it opens new perspectives and possibilities one otherwise would not have been aware of. If one were aware of all the details, one’s vision would easily be oversaturated and leave no room for new ideas to pop up. Underdetermination can be a good thing. Sometimes even contradictions do not hurt, at least temporarily. One can always try to resolve them later. One can observe a similar phenomenon in musical composition and in painting. Imagine an impressionist painter, how he sets down his brush on the canvas and has something in mind that he wants to bring out in the painting, maybe a scene he just observed or a contrast of color that is partly on the canvas already. Sometimes he is led by what is developing right then in front of his eyes that he has not foreseen or intended, when the brush suddenly bends and leaves new traces. He observes what is happening on the canvas and he instantaneously reacts to it, constantly correcting and modifying both what is there and what he has in mind. During this process, a painter is inspired by what he sees and by what he has just done himself. There is always a risk involved in boldly making a change, and there is always the benefit of surprise and the possibility of finding better ways of doing things. Setting down this patch of green right here creates uncertainty, ambiguity, and multiple possible meanings at the same time. It might be a reflection of the ship or of the woman sitting on board.

The art of doing mathematics  325 It might also be a shadow or something in the water. It might also be all of these things at the same time, or some of them. Something similar can happen when a mathematician experiments with an example and applies an unusual operation. It might create a contradiction that in turn can be resolved by applying another operation, and there might be more than one candidate for such a new operation. Maybe a mathematician will simply leave it as it is and go on, keeping the possible corrections in mind to carry them out later. He leaves it open for the time being. In the process of trying out new things, a mathematician is like a painter. Both watch what they are doing and what is going on. They constantly make tacit judgments of taste, feeling that this modification is not good and that modification interesting and worth keeping. In Kantian terminology, they use their imagination and understanding to play with what they see and do. They perceive various kinds of suitability – Kant speaks of “purposiveness” (Zweckmäßigkeit) – in the object and in what they are doing with it in the process of manipulation and contemplation. They play with their own creations, while the overall goal to find a proof or to paint a certain kind of painting recedes into the background and is forgotten for a while. Partly, the mathematician and the painter identify with the object, the reflection, a contrast, or a contradiction in the process of experiencing what they are doing. Momentary aesthetic judgments are continuously and automatically interwoven in their activities. Thus, contemplation and creation constantly interlace and reflect each other. Kant says that imagination and understanding “enliven” each other. This is where the aesthetic pleasure is. The old question of whether mathematical objects, theories, and truths are discovered or created loses its grip if one adopts such an aesthetic perspective. A mathematician plays not just with objects but also with rules. He bends and challenges rules and axioms and he creates contradictions, watching how bad or interesting things become. This is all for free. It does not even cost the money one would have to pay for oil and canvas. In the end, we may even change the rules themselves if we like. This happens, for instance, when one moves from Euclidean to non-Euclidean geometry by dropping the parallel postulate. Then one simply changes the playground. Sometimes, one intentionally applies even “wrong” numbers just to see what happens and what goes wrong and why these numbers are not allowed here. One wonders what exactly it is about the object and its structure that does not allow for these numbers. If one asks such questions, one leaves the well-trodden paths and explores new possibilities. If a theorem holds only for rational numbers, one can try an irrational one to see what happens. One can also change the number system for one in which something like p=0 holds, where p is a prime number. Such number

326  Christian Helmut Wenzel systems are called “fields of positive characteristic.” The number 7 is a prime number, and in our usual number system it is not true that 7=0. But if we identify 7 with 0, 8 with 1, 9 with 2, etc., as we do when counting the natural numbers around a clock with the 7 digits on it, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 7 on top say, and when we keep counting beyond 7. Then we get something like 7=0, 8=1, 9=2, etc. We can even add and subtract numbers in that way, moving in both directions on the clock. We can also multiply. And we can even divide, provided 7 is a prime number, which it is. This will not work with 12 instead of 7, because 12 is not a prime number. There will be no multiplicative inverses of 2, 3, and 4, that is, you can add and multiply on your watch with 12 numbers, but you cannot always divide. Similar to a mathematician changing the number system, an impressionist painter can change the light in unusual ways to dissolve usual perspectives and implicit assumptions, or a cubist painter can break the harmony of lines in order to create an additional aspect. The difference is that the mathematician eventually has to resolve the contraction, whereas the painter can leave it on the canvas, or a composer in the script. One observes all of this from the inside, in first-person perspective, by paying close attention to what one does. One observes oneself as well as the object one creates and manipulates. The whole process is visible from the inside, whereas in third-person perspective, from the outside, this is hardly possible. When we look closely at a painting, we will partly recreate the original experience and partly create our own experience. Watching a painter and the way he paints, we live through the process ourselves. A third-person perspective is insufficient here. (Even interpretations of brain scans – assumed to be done purely in third-person perspective – depend on first-person reports of the patient and on the partly first-person perspective of the interpreter, who understands the report by recalling certain of his or her own first-person experiences from the past.) Besides such first-person perspectives, another factor is important, namely the unconscious mind. Most of what we do, we do unconsciously, or it happens unconsciously. It is well known that mathematicians sometimes find their results while sleeping. They wake up and suddenly there is the solution! They must have continued working while sleeping. We all know from everyday experiences that sometimes we relax or do something else in order to allow our unconscious mental activities to remember something, to sort things out, or to find a solution to a problem. One does not need to be a mathematician for that. We unconsciously recreate many of our daily activities, cast unusual lights on them, and sort out things. It can be important that unconscious mental activities are much faster than conscious ones. We consciously think through something if we want to make sure that we are not making any mistake. But consciousness can be also a burden. It slows us down.

The art of doing mathematics  327 Some people know how to multiply big numbers in a second. They know how to do this without knowing how they do it. They are not aware of each step, maybe they do not even know how they do it in principle. The solution simply appears to them and they read it off. Similarly, we know how to ride a bicycle without knowing what is going on in our brains or in our legs. But riding bicycles is something we do. The computations carried out in our brains are so many per second that there is no way we could ever become aware of them while riding the bike. We would fall down. It is here that we find the reason why “no Homer or Wieland can indicate how his ideas […] arise and come together in his head” (section 47, quoted above), and this applies to mathematicians as well. Many things are done subconsciously and unconsciously. How does one multiply big numbers in a split second and do it all in the head? One can practice this. I have done this a little, just for fun and out of curiosity. The experience is remarkable. One actually does many things simultaneously. One keeps multiplying new numbers while adding at the same time intermediate results. One does this “here,” and one does that “there.” One does it not in the linear way we usually follow when we carry out the computations on paper. Instead, one does it in parallel fashion. (Here a comparison: Recall that the real numbers can be defined as equivalent classes of infinite sequences of rational numbers. There are uncountably, infinitely many such classes, and each member of such a class, i.e. each sequence, consists of infinitely many rational numbers. Thus, there are infinities of infinities, levels of infinities, and instead of trying to finish something on one level before going to the next, one can develop things in parallel fashion.) Thus, there is again no “natural path,” certainly not “the” natural one. With more practice the numbers get bigger, the operations become faster, and in the end it goes unconsciously, like walking, riding a bike, or driving a car. Some things we can bring up to our conscious mind, others we cannot. The shadowy area between the conscious and the unconscious is where I believe much of the aesthetics of doing mathematics and of any other kind of creative activity takes place. What goes on unconsciously or subconsciously is often fantastic, wild, and chaotic. In mathematics, as in the arts, we need techniques and we need to practice. But the more we have learned to do certain things consciously and well, the more we can let go down into the subconscious and unconscious mind. And then the faster and more powerful we become. Gauss and Mozart were gifted but they also had to practice. They could do many things very fast. Poincaré described how he once had worked on a problem for weeks and months, put it aside and went on holiday, and how, when getting into a bus, the solution suddenly appeared to him. Unconsciously, he had been trying out many things and the solution popped up to his conscious mind.

328  Christian Helmut Wenzel We have seen that Kant said that what mathematicians discover or invent “could also have been learned, and thus still lies on the natural path of inquiry and reflection in accordance with rules,” and we have criticized this view for its oversimplification. There is no single path but there are many possible ones. There are many steps in a proof and each step involves a choice from a set of infinitely many possibilities, and there are no determining rules for such choices. Unconsciously, we can work and play through such possibilities much faster than we can do consciously. Hence, it is sometimes useful to do things unconsciously. I believe that aesthetic considerations are a useful way to more or less consciously pay attention to what goes on at the threshold to consciousness, and then to allow suitable (purposive, zweckmäßige) results to pop up. Poincaré said something like this about doing mathematics, but he did not think of Kant’s aesthetics (as far as I know). We become aware of what is appealing and what harmoniously fits. Here, we can see the Kantian “third moment” of a judgment of taste (the principle of a priori subjective purposiveness) playing a role in doing mathematical research, similarly as in composing music or creating a painting. I suggest that the choices made at each step of a proof are partly based on aesthetic considerations, at least when we do not just “follow” a proof but discover it ourselves. Often there is a feeling of fitting and harmony between imagination and understanding regarding the object we are dealing with before the step is fully worked out, that is, before the aesthetic harmony turns into an epistemic one required for cognition. The harmony is still free from the determining function of concepts. The proof is not yet fully worked out. The harmony is still playful. But at the same time, it is an indication that the step might well lead to a proof. Still, there is a difference between mathematics and the arts, because there is right and wrong in mathematics in ways that cannot be found in the arts. If we change just one number or variable in a mathematical proof, it will not work anymore. But in a painting, something could be slightly changed here or there and the painting would thereby not be “wrong” or worthless. Why is that? Mathematics is about something (natural numbers, say) and hence its statements are either right or wrong. Mathematics has axioms and definitions. It is formal and the objects can also be formally defined (the natural numbers for instance by the Peano axioms). There are deductive methods, and there are strict rules that confine freedom, that is, one must (usually) stick to the axioms and there must be no contradiction. Thus, when writing down a proof one must adhere to these rules. Art is not like this. The similarities I have been bringing out are in the first-­person perspective, while there is a third-person perspective in mathematics (the axioms and definitions) that cannot be found in the arts. Thus, there is more freedom in the arts, and this is what people usually have in mind. But looking at things in this way, emphasis is on the results,

The art of doing mathematics  329 not on the process of creation and discovery, not on the choices of steps in proofs, nor on the choices of axioms at the beginning. And even a wrong proof is often not worthless but still involves good ideas. It can be improved and sometimes corrected. Mathematical theorems seem eternal and fixed only if we assume the axioms to be fixed. But axioms are also up to us and can be changed. As the Greek root of the word indicates (αξιοω), they are something we value. And even if we keep the axioms, there are many examples one can look at and there are different directions into which theories can develop. There are many methods and objects that can be introduced. But this kind of freedom is later usually forgotten. Mathematicians often believe that the objects they work with already exist in an eternal Platonic realm. Frege said that thoughts exist in a “third realm” and can be discovered (Frege 1918–19: 69). But we can ask why it is that we discover these objects and theorems that we have discovered so far and not any other ones. Why have we carved out that piece from the third realm and not another one? Mathematics has a history and why should there be only one history possible? We can say that mathematical theorems exist in a Platonic realm, but we can say the same about poems, written and unwritten. Alan Hájek in this volume has shown how heuristics plays a role in philosophy. Simply put, perspiration is often part of inspiration. Many of his observations are parallel or complementary to the observations I have given about the role of aesthetics in mathematics. For instance, the idea that there is “plenty of room” for “when and how to use” certain heuristics is parallel to my observation that there are no rules for when and how to use rules. Simply put, my emphasis has been more on the opposite direction, showing how aesthetic inspiration is helpful in successful perspiration, that is, in making hard work on some creative task successful.

Acknowledgements For corrections, comments, and suggestions, I wish to thank David Bloor, Paisley Livingston, Berys Gaut, Matthew Kieran, and Alan Hájek.

Bibliography Boyer, Carl B. (1968) A History of Mathematics, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Frege, Gottlob. (1918-19) “Der Gedanke. Eine Logische Untersuchung” (English translation “Thought”), in Beträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus 2, 58–77. Hacking, Ian (2014). Why Is There Philosophy of Mathematics at All?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

330  Christian Helmut Wenzel Heath, Thomas Little. (1921) A History of Greek Mathematics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. (1902) Gesammelte Schriften, Akademie Ausgabe (AA) in 29 vols., Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Kant, Immanuel. (2000) Critique of The Power of Judgment, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, New York: Cambridge University Press. Krausz, Michael, Denis Dutton, and Karen Bardsley (eds). (2009) The Idea of Creativity, Leiden: Brill. Livingston, Paisley. (2009) “Poincaré’s ‘Delicate Sieve’: On Creativity and Constraints in the Arts,” in The Idea of Creativity, Michael Krausz, Denis Dutton, and Karen Bardsley (eds), Leiden: Brill, 129–146. Plotnitsky, Arkady. (1998) “Mathematics and Aesthetics,” in Encyclopedia of Aes­ thetics, Michael Kelly (ed.), Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press. Poincaré, Henri. (1905) La valeur de la science, Paris: Flammarion. Poincaré, Henri. (1908) Science et Méthode, Paris: Flammarion. Poincaré, Henri. (1913) Dernière Pensées, Paris: Flammarion. Polanyi, Michael. (2009) “The Creative Imagination,” in The Idea of Creativity, Michael Krausz, Denis Dutton, and Karen Bardsley (eds), Leiden: Brill, 147–164. Von Fritz, Kurt. (1945) “The Discovery of Incommensurability by Hippasus of Metapontum,” Annals of Mathematics 46/2, 242–264. Wenzel, Christian Helmut. (2001) “Beauty, Genius, and Mathematics. Why Did Kant Change His Mind?” History of Philosophy Quarterly 18/4, 415–432. Wenzel, Christian Helmut. (2013) “Art and Imagination in Mathematics,” in Imagination in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, Michael L. Thompson (ed.), Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 49–68.

Part VI CREATIVITY IN ART, MORALITY  AND POLITICS

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19 Creativity as an artistic merit James Grant

Here is a puzzling contrast. Creativity helps make artworks good. Joyce’s Ulysses, Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia basilica, and Blake’s Ghost of a Flea are good works of art partly because they are creative. But creativity does not help make many other creative things good of their kind. A creative explanation is not a better explanation in virtue of being creative. A creative design for an engine is not a good design for an engine because it is creative. The creativity of a diplomat’s peace plan is no part of what makes it a good peace plan. The creativity of these things might be a good thing about them, but it does not help make them good of their kind. Why is this? Why is creativity an artistic merit? The aim of this chapter is to answer this question. Answering it promises to shed light on the nature of artistic value. One way of gaining a better reflective understanding of a kind of value is to consider what its criteria are and why they are its criteria. There is something distinctive about artistic value, in virtue of which creativity enhances it, but not many other kinds of value. Explaining why creativity is an artistic merit should therefore provide a better understanding of artistic value itself. In the first section, I elucidate the claim that creativity is an artistic merit. I say what creativity is and what an artistic merit is. In the second, I discuss reasons to doubt this claim. A good explanation of the merit of creativity should address these doubts. In the third, I develop a theory of artistic merit that appeals to the final value of acting excellently – for example, virtuously or skilfully. I argue in the fourth section that this theory gives us a good explanation of why creativity is an artistic merit. I conclude by identifying questions raised by this theory, as well as some of its important ramifications. A note on terminology: I believe that creativity, in the sense (or one of the senses) in which it is an artistic merit, is the same property as imaginativeness. But I prefer the term “imaginativeness,” for reasons I give in a note.1 I also say “artistic merit,” not “artistic value,” and I set out my reasons in this note.2 But I suspect that many who use “artistic value” just mean artistic merit, and so, from their perspective, this is also just a terminological preference.

334  James Grant

1 The explanandum What is meant by saying that imaginativeness is an artistic merit? It will help to start with some distinctions. First, having artistic merit is different from being a good artwork. An artwork can have artistic merit without being a good artwork. It can fail to be good, but not entirely lack merit.3 Being a good artwork clearly involves having artistic merit. But exactly how having merit and being good are related is a delicate question. It is not clear, for instance, that being a good artwork is just being an artwork with substantial artistic merit. A work with substantial merit might also have major defects. It is not clear that such a work would necessarily be good. It is not even clear that such a work would necessarily be better than one with slightly less merit but minor defects. Goodness and betterness may be a more complex function of merit and demerit. However, in what follows I shall assume that one work is better than another at least when the first has more merit and no more demerit. Second, there is a distinction between artistic merit and artistic merits. Works have artistic merit in virtue of the artistic merits they have. Artistic merits are properties that give works artistic merit (though as I shall argue shortly, there is more to being an artistic merit than this). For example, gracefulness is an artistic merit, and some Gothic arches have artistic merit because they are graceful. Moreover, good works are good in virtue of their artistic merits. Some arches are good because they are graceful. So merits give works merit and make works good. In what follows, I shall treat “P gives it merit,” “P enhances its merit,” and “It has merit in virtue of (having) P” as synonymous. Each entails that it has merit because it has P. Third, not every property that gives some artwork artistic merit is an artistic merit. Suppose a painting has merit because it is powerfully expressive, and it is powerfully expressive because it is garish. This painting has merit because it is garish. Garishness gives the painting merit by making it powerfully expressive. But this does not mean that garishness is an artistic merit. One might want to say that garishness is an artistic merit of this painting. This is fine if one means only that it gives this painting artistic merit. But then one should distinguish between being an artistic merit and being an artistic merit of some work. How does being an artistic merit differ from simply being a property that gives some work artistic merit? The difference, I suggest, is that artistic merits are standards or criteria of artistic merit. Not all properties that give some work merit are criteria or standards of merit. The fact that some work’s garishness gives it merit by making it powerfully expressive does not show that garishness is a standard of artistic merit. Fourth, in describing a property as a merit, I mean to be neutral about whether it gives merit to every work that should have it. Holists about

Creativity as an artistic merit  335 merits, who deny that any property has an invariable merit-giving valence, need have no objection to the claim that there are criteria of merit. Lastly, non-artworks can have artistic merit. The least controversial examples are parts of artworks. A line of a multi-line poem can have poetic merit. But it is not an artwork. Some accounts of artistic value require the bearers of artistic value to be artworks (e.g., Budd 1995: 2; Hanson 2013: 499–500). These accounts are either mistaken or talking about a different property than artistic merit. The next question is what imaginativeness is. The first thing to note is that artworks are imaginative as members of kinds. An artwork might be an imaginative gift but not an imaginative artwork. Clearly, imaginativeness as a gift is not an artistic merit. Imaginativeness as an artwork is. So what is it to be imaginative as an artwork? I have defended the following view (Grant 2013: ch. 3.5–6). All cases of imaginativeness involve thinking of something that was not an obvious thing to think of, and which it was plausible to believe would have a reasonable chance of success. The kind of success in question determines the kind of imaginativeness. Commonly, success means having substantial value as a member of some kind. For example, an unobvious gift to think of, which it was plausible to believe would be a good gift, is an imaginative gift.4 In the case of imaginative artworks, the artist thinks of a way a work might be. This is not an obvious way for a work to be to think of. And it is plausible for her to believe that being this way has a reasonable chance of giving the work substantial artistic merit. A dancer might think of an unobvious way of moving gracefully; a sculptor might decide to leave the stone rough-hewn to make it more expressive, when polish would be the obvious choice; a playwright might think of a surprising and satisfying denouement for the plot. Non-artworks whose imaginativeness is an artistic merit are similar. Their maker or performer thought of an unobvious way for them to be which it was plausible to believe would give them substantial artistic merit. Let us call this artistic imaginativeness. In my account, imaginative thinking is fundamental. Acts, omissions, and their products can all be imaginative. But imaginative things other than thinking are imaginative because of the imaginative thinking that went into them. Two points deserve emphasis. First, I mean thinking of something in the sense of thinking up or coming up with something – the sense in which you think of a solution. I do not mean thinking of something in the sense of merely bringing something to mind or thinking about it – the sense in which you think of what you did last summer. Second, thinking of something does not necessarily precede doing. A comedian replying to a heckler thinks of a reply, even if she did not first think of it and then deliver it. She thinks aloud. A hockey player who makes an imaginative pass thought of a way of getting the puck to her teammate, even if she didn’t think before passing.

336  James Grant My account also allows for imaginative failures. It must be plausible to believe that what you thought of had reasonable prospects of success. But to be imaginative, it need not actually succeed. Leonardo’s designs for flying machines were failures as designs, because the machines would not have flown. But they were imaginative designs.5 Is artistic imaginativeness an artistic merit even when it fails? That is, even when the features thought of for the work do not actually give it merit, though it was plausible for the artist to believe they would? I find it difficult to think of cases in which failed artistic imaginativeness gives something very much merit. But it seems to me that it still confers some merit. A plot that does not cohere is not greatly redeemed by being imaginative, nor is a comedy that is not amusing. But imaginative failure is still better than unimaginative failure. However this may be, in what follows I shall focus on explaining why successful artistic imaginativeness is an artistic merit. After giving this explanation, I shall return to the topic of imaginative failures. It is interesting if imaginativeness is an artistic merit. I have already given one reason: imaginativeness does not confer various other kinds of merit or goodness, such as goodness as an explanation. Even when it does, it is not necessarily a criterion of that kind of goodness. A chess move might unnerve your opponent because it is imaginative. So its imaginativeness makes it a good move to make. But this does not mean imaginativeness is a criterion of being a good chess move to make. A second reason is that imaginativeness is a merit that things have in virtue of properties that it was plausible to believe would give the work a different merit. Similes can be imaginative in virtue of properties that were plausibly expected to make them apt; jokes in virtue of properties expected to make them funny; dancing in virtue of grace-making properties. So, at least in cases of imaginative success, the properties that make the work imaginative confer artistic merit by two routes: by giving it the first-order merit and by making it imaginative. The first-order merit gives it merit, and the imaginativeness gives it additional merit. There seem to be several features that are like imaginativeness in this respect. Virtuosity, skilfulness, intelligence, craftsmanship, and artistry are others. In each case, it is an artistic merit that a different artistic merit was realized, or at least aimed at, in a certain way - skilfully, intelligently, and so forth. We might call these higher-order artistic merits.

2 Deflationism These points may make it interesting to claim that imaginativeness is an artistic merit. But they also raise suspicions about this claim. Similar suspicions have been expressed about originality.

Creativity as an artistic merit  337 First, if imaginativeness does not enhance other kinds of merit, one might doubt that it enhances artistic merit. Jack Meiland (1983: 121–2) argues against the aesthetic value of originality on these grounds. Originality does not enhance other things’ value of their kind (e.g., the original telephone). But one would expect it to, he says, if it enhanced the aesthetic value of artworks. Second, the fact that imaginativeness depends on properties expected to give the work another merit raises the suspicion that the other merit is conferring all the merit. The suspicion will be strengthened if one doubts that imaginativeness is a merit in cases of failure to realize the other merit. That suggests that it is the first-order merit, not the imaginativeness, which is conferring all the merit in cases of success. As Bruce Vermazen (1991: 276–7) has argued about originality, the reason why we think imaginativeness gives works merit is that many works do have merit in virtue of properties that also help make them imaginative. This makes us think, wrongly, that they have merit in virtue of their imaginativeness. Third, one might adapt another argument from Vermazen (1991: 271–2) against the aesthetic value of originality.6 Take Frans Hals’s portraits painted in his mature manner. These differ significantly from each other only in that different faces were painted. So the later portraits, at least, are not imaginative. But all are wonderful. And the later ones are no worse for not being imaginative: I might prefer to have the first portrait rather than the eleventh, but my preference would clearly not be for reasons of artistic merit if the eleventh were, imaginativeness aside, just as good. Let us call “deflationism” the view that artistic imaginativeness is not an artistic merit. The deflationist could accept other theses about the value of imaginativeness. She might allow that imaginativeness can give things artistic merit, but is not a criterion of it. She might hold that imaginativeness gives works final value, but not artistic merit. She might even hold that imaginativeness can help make works great, but not good. Anthony Savile (1982: ch. 9) argues that artistic greatness is not extreme artistic goodness, but constitutes a different dimension of evaluation. Allowing that imaginativeness makes these kinds of difference to a work’s value might make deflationism more palatable to those who find it unintuitive. The best answer to deflationism, I suggest, is to make it intelligible why imaginativeness, and not only first-order merits, would be a criterion of artistic merit. We will have little incentive to be deflationists if this can be explained. My preferred explanation will also enable us to respond to the specific deflationist doubts voiced above.

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3 The excellence theory A common way of explaining the value of an aesthetic or artistic merit is to relate it to a quality that has non-artistic or non-aesthetic value. Frank Sibley (1959b: 31–2) suggests that qualities in artworks like warmth, clarity, regularity, and softness can be aesthetically admired for themselves because we have deep and abiding non-aesthetic interests in warmth, clarity, regularity, softness, and the like outside art.7 Similarly, Monroe Beardsley (1973: 109–10) holds that ascriptions of elegance, dignity, or stateliness to music can support judgements of aesthetic value because these qualities resemble qualities that interest us in persons. And many philosophers have explained the value of beauty by arguing that it symbolizes, expresses, or manifests valuable non-aesthetic qualities, such as moral goodness or freedom (e.g., Kant 1790: s.59; Schiller 1793; Alison 1811). A simple version of this approach is to argue that the imaginativeness of the artwork is an artistic merit because it manifests the imaginativeness of a person (the artist). Many claim that the imaginativeness of a person is a virtue or skill, and many hold that virtues or skills have final value.8 One might not agree that imaginativeness is a virtue or skill. But one might still agree that the imaginativeness of a person normally has final value, whether that person is an artist or not. The imaginativeness of an artwork manifests this finally valuable quality of persons, and that is why it is an artistic merit. One problem with this explanation is that the imaginativeness of a work doesn’t necessarily manifest the imaginativeness of a person. One needn’t be an imaginative person to produce an imaginative artwork. One must certainly think imaginatively to do so. But one needn’t be an imaginative person to think imaginatively on isolated occasions. The imaginativeness of persons is a propensity to think imaginatively (see Grant 2013: 80–1), and one needn’t have a propensity to think imaginatively in order to do so. Yet the imaginativeness of an artwork gives it merit even if the artist was not an imaginative person. As these remarks suggest, however, the imaginativeness of a work does always manifest the imaginativeness of a person’s thinking. Every artistically imaginative work is the realization of an imaginative thought of a way of giving something artistic merit. One might hold that the imaginativeness of thinking has final value, just as the imaginativeness of persons is said to have. For one might think that the virtuousness or skilfulness or, in general, the excellence of an act has final value. It makes that act an end in itself.9 The imaginativeness of thinking is an excellence of the mental act of thinking.10 So it too has final value. Perhaps, then, the imaginativeness of a work is an artistic merit because it manifests the imaginativeness of the artist’s thinking. It is the relation

Creativity as an artistic merit  339 between artistic imaginativeness and a finally valuable quality of thought that explains why the former is an artistic merit. This explanation has much to recommend it. In the first place, there is good reason to believe that manifesting an excellence of thought, perception, or action in the realization of another artistic merit can make a property an artistic merit. Many higher-order merits are like this. The intelligence of a work, which manifests the intelligence of the artist’s acts of realizing first-order merits, can be a merit of that work. That a work has artistic merit realized skilfully, dexterously, or deftly is a further merit of it. Excellences of perception also seem relevant. It is a merit if a comedian’s humour is well observed, and a painter’s eye is discriminating. Skilfulness in arousing certain feelings, such as suspense, seems to count too. We also praise works for manifesting ethical excellences. E.H. Gombrich observes that for centuries critics “have branded colour combinations as ‘vulgar’ or exalted forms as ‘dignified,’ have praised the ‘honesty’ of one artist’s palette and rejected the ‘meretricious’ effects of others” (1963: 15). Others have made similar observations about ethical excellences.11 It can be an artistic merit that a work is bold, sincere, authentic, poised, restrained, or sensitive, and a flaw that it is pretentious, emotionally manipulative, timid, dishonest, flashy, clumsy, or coarse. In the second place, this account makes it intelligible why manifesting an excellence can make a property an artistic merit. According to this account, excellences have final value. Acting excellently is an end in itself. It is not just the ends that excellent behaviour can be directed toward that are ends in themselves. It is worth acting excellently for its own sake. Therefore, it is unsurprising that there exists a practice in which we count properties that manifest excellences as criteria of merit. Indeed, there appear to be other practices like this. Games (that is, matches) are another example. It is a merit in a game if the aim of the game is skilfully pursued. That is one criterion of being a good game. The position, then, is this. One reason why a property can be an artistic merit is that the property manifests an excellence of thought, action, or perception in the realization of some other artistic merit.12 Manifesting such an excellence makes a property an artistic merit because such excellences have final value. Let us call these two claims the excellence theory of artistic merit.13 On this theory, artistic imaginativeness is an artistic merit because it manifests such an excellence of thought – namely, the imaginativeness of the artist’s thinking. This theory faces the following objection. The theory speaks of properties manifesting excellences of acts. But some bearers of artistic merit, such as a musician’s performance, are themselves acts. They possess excellences, such as skilfulness. They do not merely have properties that manifest them. And at least some of these excellences, such as skilfulness, are

340  James Grant artistic merits of those acts. Surely being an excellence, not just ­manifesting one, can make a property of an act an artistic merit. The excellence theorist should accept this. She should say that manifesting an excellence of thought, perception, or action in the realization of some other artistic merit, or being an excellence of an act in the realization of artistic merit, can make a property an artistic merit. Being such an excellence makes a property an artistic merit because excellences have final value. The considerations raised above in favour of the original excellence theory – that it explains why many merits are merits, and that excellences have final value – favour this conclusion, too. The modified excellence theory suggests a modified explanation of why artistic imaginativeness is an artistic merit. Imaginativeness, too, can be an artistic merit of performances, such as an actor’s portrayal of a character. Plausibly, then, artistic imaginativeness is an artistic merit because it manifests an excellence of thought, and sometimes also because it is an excellence of acts. There are several points worth clarifying about the excellence theory. For one, it is not a comprehensive theory of artistic merit. It says nothing about why any first-order merits are merits. It is only about a class of higherorder merits, because its claim is that manifesting excellence in the realization of some other artistic merit can make a property an artistic merit. It is also neutral about the relative weights of different merits. Accomplishing some things excellently might confer more merit than accomplishing other things just as excellently, and manifesting some excellences might count for more than manifesting others does, for all the excellence theory says. Second, the excellence theory does not imply that excellences have final value under all conditions.14 Perhaps the coolness of a villain, to use Kant’s example (1785: 4:394), lacks final value. The final value of an excellence might be conditional on the act not being evil, and perhaps on other factors as well. That excellences normally have final value suffices to explain why we count them and properties that manifest them as criteria of merit. Third, for an act to have final value is for that act to be worth performing for its own sake. Final value is what many philosophers call “intrinsic value” (e.g., Kagan 1998; Zimmerman 2001). But many prefer the expression “final value” (e.g., Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen 2000) because some philosophers, notably Moore, reserve “intrinsic value” for the value something has in virtue of its intrinsic properties alone. I do not assume that an act’s intrinsic properties are all that make it worth performing for its own sake, so I also prefer “final value.” Further, an act with final value is not necessarily the act that there is most reason for you to perform. One thing can be more worth doing, for its own sake, than another, even though both are worth doing for their own sakes. And I assume that, as the word “final” suggests, an act is an end in itself iff it is

Creativity as an artistic merit  341 worth performing for its own sake. But this claim is not essential. If more is needed for an act to be an end in itself (e.g., if the act must be especially worth performing for its own sake), then the account of acts with final value as the ones worth performing for their own sakes still stands. Fourth, manifesting excellence per se is not what the excellence theory says can make a property a merit. It is manifesting excellence in the realization of artistic merit. A work might be courageous simply for expressing banned political views. The excellence theory does not suggest that this is an artistic merit. It suggests that courageousness in the realization of another artistic merit is an artistic merit. Expressing a certain political view is not an artistic merit. What is relevant to the excellence theory are cases in which it was courageous to realize a certain artistic merit, or to realize one in a certain way. Fifth, the excellence theory’s claim is that manifesting or being an excellence in the realization of another merit can make a property an artistic merit. The theory does not assert (or deny) that this always does make a property an artistic merit. So, if there are cases in which it does not, this by itself would not undermine the theory. Nor would it undermine its account of imaginativeness. There are good moral explanations (e.g., of an act’s rightness) that appeal to generalizations with exceptions. We might expect our explanation of the merit of imaginativeness to do so. A full account of any enabling and defeating conditions there may be is not necessary for a successful explanation. Finally, for the work’s properties to manifest excellences, the artist’s behaviour, thinking, or perception must really have possessed these excellences. The work is not intelligent or imaginative if the artist’s acts were not. Manifesting excellence is therefore different from being expressive of emotion. A work can be sad without the artist having been sad. By contrast, it matters what excellences actually characterized the thinking, acting, and perceiving that went into the work’s creation. The excellence theory therefore takes sides in one of the debates in the philosophy of art over the relevance of the actual artist to criticism. Romantic theories of artistic expression as the overflow of powerful feelings may have been discredited, and Romantic theories of artistic meaning as artist’s meaning may need to be heavily qualified or rejected outright. But if the excellence theory is correct, a robustly Romantic theory of artistic merit is true.

4  Deflationism deflated This account gives us a reply to deflationism. First, it makes it intelligible why artistic imaginativeness, and not only first-order merits, would be a criterion of artistic merit. The reason is that the imaginativeness

342  James Grant of acts has final value, as other excellences of acts do. It is not only the ends achieved by imaginative acts (in this case, realization of first-order merits) that can have final value. So it is understandable that artistic imaginativeness would be a criterion of merit over and above the firstorder merits. Second, the account enables us to see why imaginativeness is a criterion of artistic merit, but not of various other kinds of merit. The reason is that manifesting excellence of thought is irrelevant to many other kinds of merit. This is so even when the object manifests excellence of thought in the realization of first-order merits for that kind of merit. A mouse-trap might manifest excellent thinking about how to build a better mouse-trap. But that is no part of what makes it a better mouse-trap. It does not catch mice any better in virtue of manifesting excellent thinking about how to catch mice better. It catches mice better in virtue of the features thought of. Third, the deflationist is nevertheless wrong that artistic merit is unique in having imaginativeness as a criterion. Imaginativeness is a criterion of merit in games, just as other excellences are. A game is better for involving imaginative play.15 Fourth, the excellence theory suggests an account of imaginative failures. Many such failures manifest deficiencies of excellence. For example, it might be plausible to believe, in advance of making the work, that the work would have artistic merit in virtue of being a certain way. But it might not be plausible to believe this once you have made it that way and seen the results. It might show poor judgement to leave the work that way, even if the initial thought to make it that way was imaginative. The imaginativeness of that aspect of the work gives the work little or no merit because the same aspect of the work manifests poor judgement. We can thus explain why imaginative failure contributes less to merit than imaginative success, without endorsing the deflationist view that it is only first-order merits that ever contribute.16 Lastly, we can reply to the Vermazen-inspired objection that Frans Hals’s later paintings in his mature style are not imaginative, but are no worse than his first painting in that style. The reason the later paintings are no worse is that they also manifest the imaginativeness of Hals’s thinking. He thought of an imaginative style in which to paint portraits, and the later portraits manifest this thought. There is nothing about the first portrait in virtue of which it alone counts as a manifestation of this thought. Indeed, he might have thought of an imaginative style without thinking of it for some portrait in particular, or he might have thought of it and formed the intention to employ it in several portraits. Especially in these cases, it would be clear that the first portrait is not the only manifestation of his imaginative thinking. The later portraits are imaginative too.

Creativity as an artistic merit  343 Still, one might reply that there would surely come a point when a­ dopting the same style yet again would result in a work that is not imaginative. This does not salvage deflationism, because it is not clear that this wouldn’t also be the point where the resulting work would be inferior to those that went before. But one might think it poses a problem for the excellence theorist. After all, the work would still realize the initial, imaginative thought the artist had long ago. How, then, can the excellence theorist explain why it would be inferior? The explanation, I suggest, is that it would no longer be plausible for the artist to believe that making the work in that style would give it substantial merit. And it would no longer be plausible to believe this because, by that point, making it in that style would clearly be lazy, perfunctory, or mechanical. Manifesting these qualities is an artistic defect, as the excellence theory itself suggests. So one condition of imaginativeness, the plausibility condition, would not be satisfied by the later work. The thinking manifested by the work is not imaginative, all things considered, even if an imaginative thought in the past played a role in its production. Vermazen asks us which painting we would rather own (for the right reasons) as a test of which work is better. The underlying assumption, that the better artwork provides the greater benefit, of the right kind, to its audience, is widespread (e.g., Currie 1989: 97–103; Levinson 2002: 233–6; Goldman 2006: 341). Others besides Vermazen use it to argue that features like originality and imaginativeness are not artistic merits (e.g., Meiland 1983: 121). Imaginative or original works, they say, give audiences no greater benefit, of a relevant kind, than very similar works that are not imaginative or original, such as extremely accurate copies, or later works in the same style. Even if it is beneficial to appreciate the imaginativeness of an original or that of an artist, others say we could appreciate such imaginativeness just as well by appreciating a perfect though unimaginative copy. So at minimum, enabling us to perfectly appreciate imaginativeness is just as great an artistic merit as actually being imaginative (Stang 2012: 275, 277; cf. Currie 1989: 98). But the assumption that the better work necessarily provides the greater benefit (of some kind) is not a trivial one. Those who make it presuppose a conception of artistic merit—often a form of experientialism—that is sometimes the very one in dispute. One might find it strange that an original that manifests excellence would be better than a copy that does not if the original provides no greater benefit. But if the excellence theory is right, this is not strange. Other things being equal, making the original was more worth doing, for its own sake, than making the copy was. Greater final value underlies its greater artistic merit. We should consider the value of what went into the work, not merely the value of what we get out of it, when explaining its artistic merit.

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5 The excellence theory extended For these reasons, I think the appeal to excellence is a good explanation of why imaginativeness is an artistic merit. As a theory of artistic merit, the excellence theory requires further development. It would be good to have an account of what an excellence is. I have mentioned virtuousness and skilfulness as two forms of excellence. But I have not provided a definition of an excellence. Another question is why we should believe that excellences of acts have final value. It would be good to have an argument for this, and an explanation of why it is the case. Lastly, the relation of excellence to greatness, if greatness is not simply extreme goodness, remains to be explored. If the excellence theory is true, it has noteworthy implications. First, it implies that some things have final value in virtue of their artistic merits. As we have seen, some bearers of artistic merit are acts. Some of these acts have final value in virtue of their excellences. Some of these excellences are artistic merits. So, some things have final value in virtue of their artistic merits. Second, the excellence theory gives us reason to believe that some ethical qualities of artworks affect their artistic merit. Some of a work’s ethical qualities manifest ethical excellences and deficiencies of the artist’s acts, in the realization of artistic merit. That a work boldly realizes some artistic merit is an artistic merit. That it is an emotionally manipulative attempt to achieve dramatic intensity is an artistic flaw. Some ethical qualities are artistic merits for the same reason imaginativeness is. With this account, I have not ruled out the possibility that imaginativeness is an artistic merit for other reasons. In particular, explanations of why the imaginativeness of persons has final value suggest other possible explanations of why artistic imaginativeness is an artistic merit. The imaginativeness of persons has been linked with courage, individuality, power, spontaneity, autonomy, and freedom.17 One might think artistic imaginativeness is an artistic merit because it expresses or manifests such qualities.18 Vindicating such a claim would require establishing that artistic imaginativeness is indeed linked to these qualities, and that this link makes it a merit. Here, I hope to have established the truth of one explanation of why imaginativeness is an artistic merit.19

Notes 1 “Creativity” tends to invite questions about creation. Can types (like novels) really be created? Is an act really creative when it does not aim at creating something distinct from itself (e.g., in dance)? What about destructive acts? These questions are distractions from the question of why creativity, in the sense I am concerned with, is an artistic merit, and “imaginativeness” does not tend to invite them. They arise because there are causative senses of “creative” in which the word applies only to something that creates. In these senses, it applies to persons and to some acts, but not to paintings or to some performances.

Creativity as an artistic merit  345 2 “Artistic value” is used to cover both artistic goodness and artistic greatness. As we’ll see, some argue that artistic greatness is not simply extreme artistic goodness, but constitutes a different dimension of evaluation altogether. I wish to remain neutral about this. But I want an expression that relates only to artistic goodness if greatness is not just extreme goodness. So I prefer “artistic merit.” I also suspect that “artistic value” encourages a widespread tendency to assume that the better work is the one that, in some respect, benefits the audience more, a tendency I criticize at the end of this chapter.“Artistic value” makes us more likely to take for granted that the work with more artistic value is of more value to us. “Artistic merit” is less liable to have this effect. 3 Having artistic merit is, I take it, what some philosophers would call being artistically good “to some extent.” 4 Strictly, it might be an imaginative gift. I claim that the plausibility and unobvious conditions are necessary conditions of imaginativeness, not that they are jointly sufficient. 5 My account thus differs from many other accounts of creativity in three respects. Other accounts standardly hold that something creative must be novel and have value, and some hold that creativity requires imagining. For example, in this volume, novelty and value conditions are accepted by Gaut, “The Value of Creativity,” and by Paul and Stokes, “Attributing Creativity,” and novelty and imagining conditions are accepted by Hills and Bird, “Creativity Without Value.” By contrast, I appeal to unobviousness and plausibly expected success, and I hold that creativity requires thinking-of. I explain why I prefer this account in Grant 2013: ch3.5–6. Here, I will mention another reason why I reject the novelty condition. It is widely agreed that a creative idea need not be unprecedented in history. A person might independently have an idea that was previously had by someone else, and the later person’s idea might still be creative. But many follow Boden (2004: 2) in holding that a creative idea must at least be “new to the person who comes up with it.” Boden and others, including those I mention above, mean that the person must never have had the idea before. But there are counterexamples even to this claim. Suppose a person has an idea again after irretrievably forgetting it. Assume that the fact she had the idea before does not explain why she has the idea now. If what she now thinks of is not an obvious thing to think of, her idea could still be creative. But it is not new to her. She has it independently of her past self, just as one might have a creative idea independently of some other past person who had it. 6 Davies (2009) suggests this argument might be applied to creativity. 7 See also Sibley (1959a: 17, 22–3, 1993: 143–7, 2001b: 235–9) and Lyas (1983: 33–5). 8 Imaginativeness as a virtue: Zagzebski (1996: 123–5, 182–3); Woodruff (2001: 28); Goldie (2010: 835); Audi (2014: 387). Kieran (2014a and 2014b) argues that exemplary creativity is a virtue; Gaut (2014) argues that creativity is a virtue in some senses of “virtue.” Imaginativeness as a skill: Goldie (2007: 382). Gaut (2009) argues that creativity involves skill. Virtues have non-instrumental value and are valued as ends: Lopes (2008: 197, 199).We value skills for their own sake: Gaut (2009: 100). Skills have only instrumental value: Lopes (2008: 197). 9 The idea that virtuous action is chosen for its own sake is ancient (e.g., Aristotle 1999: 1105a). Goldie (2008: 180 and 2010: 833) claims that exercising virtues is intrinsically or non-instrumentally valuable; Bradford (2015: 110–2) discusses such a view. 10 I am assuming that imaginativeness is an excellence. But I wish to remain neutral about whether it is a form of virtuousness, of skilfulness, or of some other kind of excellence. 11 Murdoch (1970: 59, 64–6, 86–7); Isenberg (1973); Lyas (1983); Gaut (2007: 96); Goldie (2008: 189–90). 12 Or in the attempted realization of some other artistic merit, if excellence-manifesting properties are merits even in cases of failure. 13 This theory might be welcomed by theorists of art who see manifesting skill or excellence as a condition of being art, or as something that counts toward a thing being art. See, for instance, Gaut (2000: 28); Dutton (2009: 53–4); Davies (2012: 29 and 2015: 377–8). 14 Compare Berys Gaut’s remarks on the conditional value of creativity in section 4 of his “The Value of Creativity,” this volume. 15 Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran suggested to me that, when admiring objects of use (such as mousetraps) in design museums, we also treat imaginativeness as a merit in a design. This, they suggest, is another context in which imaginativeness is a non-artistic merit.

346  James Grant 16 Another possibility is that, in some of these cases, the work itself is not imaginative, but the thought to make it that way was. The plausibility condition of imaginativeness may apply to artworks in a different way than it does to thoughts. It may be that, when judging the work’s imaginativeness, we do not only consider whether it was plausible for you to believe, when you had your idea, that your idea would work. Perhaps we also consider whether it was plausible to believe this after you implemented your idea. 17 Courage: Meyer (1967: 84); Gaut (2009: 102–3); Kieran (2014a: 132–3, 2014b: 205, 207, 215). Individuality: Tatarkiewicz (1980: 259); Dutton (2009: 54, 232–5). Power: Beardsley (1965: 303); Tatarkiewicz (1980: 259). Spontaneity: Gaut, “The Value of Creativity,” this volume. Freedom or autonomy: Barrett (1961); Meyer (1967: 83–4); Maitland (1976: 401, 404); Popper (1979: 222–3); Tatarkiewicz (1980: 259); Hausman (1984: ch. 2); Anglin (1990: 14–5); Kane (1996: ch. 6); Alperson (2003: 254); Boden (2004: 270); Gaut (2009: 100–3); Kronfeldner (2009); Boden (2011: 2); Grant (2012: 289); Barnes (2015). 18 Crowther (2001: ch. 10) argues this about individuality. 19 I am grateful to Malcolm Budd, Noël Carroll, Jason Carter, Dan Cavedon-Taylor, Víctor DuràVilà, Stacie Friend, Jason Gaiger, Berys Gaut, Anil Gomes, Alison Hills, John Hyman, Matthew Kieran, Peter Shiu-Hwa Tsu, and audiences at the National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan, the Nordic Society of Aesthetics 2016 Annual Conference in Uppsala, and Exeter College, Oxford for their helpful comments. I thank the Oxford Philosophy Faculty Board and the Governing Body of Exeter College, Oxford for granting me research leave.

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Creativity as an artistic merit  347 Budd, M. (1995) Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music, London: Penguin. Crowther, P. (2001) Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Currie, G. (1989) An Ontology of Art, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Davies, D. (2009) “The Artistic Relevance of Creativity,” in M. Krausz, D. Dutton, and K. Bardsley (eds.) The Idea of Creativity, Leiden: Brill. Davies, S. (2012) The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, S. (2015) “Defining Art and Artworlds,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73: 375–84. Dutton, D. (2009) The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaut, B. (2000) “‘Art’ as a Cluster Concept,” in N. Carroll (ed.) Theories of Art Today, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Gaut, B. (2007) Art, Emotion and Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaut, B. (2009) “Creativity and Skill,” in M. Krausz, D. Dutton, and K. Bardsley (eds.) The Idea of Creativity, Leiden: Brill. Gaut, B. (2014) “Mixed Motivations: Creativity as a Virtue,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 75: 183–202. Goldie, P. (2007) “Towards a Virtue Theory of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 47: 372–87. Goldie, P. (2008) “Virtues of Art and Human Well-Being,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 82: 179–95. Goldie, P. (2010) “Virtues of Art,” Philosophy Compass 5: 830–9. Goldman, A.H. (2006) “The Experiential Account of Aesthetic Value,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64: 333–42. Gombrich, E.H. (1963) “Visual Metaphors of Value in Art,” in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art, London: Phaidon. Grant, J. (2012) “The Value of Imaginativeness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90: 275–89. Grant, J. (2013) The Critical Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hanson, L. (2013) “The Reality of (Non-Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” The Philosophical Quarterly 63: 492–508. Hausman, C.R. (1984) A Discourse on Novelty and Creation, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Isenberg, A. (1973) “‘Pretentious’ as an Aesthetic Predicate,” in W. Callaghan et al. (eds.) Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kagan, S. (1998) “Rethinking Intrinsic Value,” The Journal of Ethics 2: 277–97. Kane, R. (1996) The Significance of Free Will, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. (1785) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M.J. Gregor and J. Timmermann, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Kant, I. (1790) Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. P. Guyer, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

348  James Grant Kieran, M. (2014a) “Creativity as a Virtue of Character,” in E.S. Paul and S.B. Kaufman (eds.) The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kieran, M. (2014b) “Creativity, Virtue and the Challenges from Natural Talent, Ill-Being and Immorality,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 75: 203–30. Kronfeldner, M.E. (2009) “Creativity Naturalized,” Philosophical Quarterly 59: 577–92. Levinson, J. (2002) “Hume’s Standard of Taste: The Real Problem,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60: 227–38. Lopes, D.M. (2008) “Virtues of Art: Good Taste,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 82: 197–211. Lyas, C. (1983) “The Relevance of the Author’s Sincerity,” in P. Lamarque (ed.) Philosophy and Fiction: Essays in Literary Aesthetics, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Maitland, J. (1976) “Creativity,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34: 397–409. Meiland, J.W. (1983) “Originals, Copies, and Aesthetic Value,” in D. Dutton (ed.) The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Meyer, L.B. (1967) “Forgery and the Anthropology of Art,” in D. Dutton (ed.) The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983. Murdoch, I. (1970) The Sovereignty of Good, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Popper, K.R. (1979) “Of Clouds and Clocks,” in Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, rev. ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rabinowicz, W., and T. Rønnow-Rasmussen (2000) “A Distinction in Value: Intrinsic and for Its Own Sake,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100: 33–51. Savile, A. (1982) The Test of Time: An Essay in Philosophical Aesthetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schiller, F. (1793) “Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried Körner,” in J.M. Bernstein (ed.) Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Sibley, F. (1959a) “Aesthetic Concepts,” in Sibley 2001a. Sibley, F. (1959b) “Aesthetics and the Looks of Things,” in Sibley 2001a. Sibley, F. (1993) “Making Music Our Own,” in Sibley 2001a. Sibley, F. (2001a) Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. J. Benson, B. Redfern and J.R. Cox, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sibley, F. (2001b) “Some Notes on Ugliness,” in Sibley 2001a. Stang, N.F. (2012) “Artworks Are Not Valuable for Their Own Sake,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70: 271–80. Tatarkiewicz, W. (1980) A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics, trans. C. Kasparek, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Vermazen, B. (1991) “The Aesthetic Value of Originality,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16: 266–79.

Creativity as an artistic merit  349 Woodruff, D.M. (2001) “A Virtue Theory of Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 35: 23–36. Zagzebski, L.T. (1996) Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zimmerman, M.J. (2001) The Nature of Intrinsic Value, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

20 Moral imaginativeness, moral creativity and possible futures Tim Mulgan

I argue that moral imaginativeness and moral creativity are increasingly important, both for our present ethical thinking about the future and for ethics within possible futures. Moral imaginativeness explores surprising new ways to develop or extend one’s existing store of moral concepts, values, norms, and idioms, while moral creativity puts moral imaginativeness into practice. Moral creativity is distinct from morally relevant non-moral creativity, from ethical “business-as-usual”, and from non-moral creativity about ethics; it is predominantly a collective, rather than an individual phenomenon; it is a practical activity with a theoretical dimension; and it undermines any attempt to predict the human future. There are things we could do to promote or enhance it, and these may be different from what best promotes creativity and imaginativeness more generally. My principal aim is to highlight the importance of the phenomenon and to stimulate further debate.

1  Examples of moral creativity I introduce moral creativity using two historical examples. The first involves re-imagining morality in straightened circumstances, while the second extends the circle of moral concern. Plenty Coups Reimagines Crow Courage. In his book Radical Hope, Jonathan Lear recounts the moral journey of the Crow chief Plenty Coups who lead his tribe through the loss of their traditional hunting grounds in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Lear 2008). Lear interprets Plenty Coups as re-imagining the traditional Crow virtue of courage. What counted as courage in a world dominated by tribal warfare no longer makes sense either against the overwhelming military force of the US Army (where military opposition can only bring futile destruction) or in the post-conquest world of the reservation (where traditional warfare is mere pointless criminality). Plenty Coups sought, not merely a variation on a familiar theme (such as a new way of being courageous in battle), but something entirely new: a way to be courageous in a world without war. This challenge required moral creativity, because traditional Crow ethics had no vocabulary or

Moral creativity and possible futures  351 concepts to deal with this unprecedented and unforeseen challenge, and it was not obvious how to proceed. I argue below that, in several credible futures, we may all face analogues of Plenty Coups’s dilemma. Environmental ethics and animal rights. In the second-half of the twentieth century, a number of influential thinkers and activists challenged the anthropocentrism of traditional Western ethics, urging us to extend our circle of moral concern to include animals, plants, eco-systems, and perhaps even inanimate nature. Within philosophy, prominent landmarks include Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949), Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975), Jonas’s The Imperative of Responsibility (1984), and Taylor’s Respect for Nature (1986). These recent developments echo earlier debates over moral universalism, such as the abolition of slavery (especially race-based slavery), the recognition of the rights of women, the extension of the franchise, and so on. Any extension of moral concern requires creativity because it is not obvious how, or in what ways, our circle of concern should be extended (Ebenreck 1996; King 1999; Brady 2011). Creativity is especially necessary for extensions beyond humanity. As the many controversies within environmental ethics demonstrate, even if we agree that we should bring non-human nature into our ethical thinking, it is far from clear how we should do so. Similar difficulties surround possible future extensions of moral concern to encompass virtual, digital, or artificial entities whose sentience, autonomy, and rationality are in doubt. One pressing question there is whether extending the circle of moral concern is always a good thing (Mulgan 2014). History provides many other examples of moral creativity, involving the discovery that alternative ways of life are both possible and ethically coherent. Two examples that I hope to discuss in more detail elsewhere are the emergence of religiously tolerant liberal states in Europe in the Early Modern Period (contrast the different approaches to religious liberty in the social contract theories of Thomas Hobbes and John Rawls); and the eradication of foot-binding in China in the early twentieth century or female genital mutilation in Africa in the early twenty-first century (Mackie 2000).

2  Some preliminary distinctions We begin by defining terms. The philosophical literature offers competing definitions and distinctions. And different sub-disciplines have both different concerns and different terminological conventions. In particular, aestheticians who write about artistic creativity (e.g., Boden 2004; Gaut 2010; Paul and Kaufman 2014) often talk past moral philosophers discussing moral imagination (e.g., Johnson, M., 1993; Kekes 2006; Martin 2006; Hargrave 2009).

352  Tim Mulgan One common distinction in the aesthetics literature is between “­imagination” and “imaginativeness” (Gaut 2010; Grant 2012; Stokes 2014). Imagination is the ability to visualise, picture, or entertain an object, scenario, or state of affairs (Gaut 2003); imaginativeness is the ability to recognise or invent new possibilities.1 My own definition is adapted from Margaret Boden’s influential definition of creativity: X is imaginative if and only if X is new, surprising, and valuable (Boden 2004: 1).2 Imagination can be unimaginative. Consider a new dystopian novel written by mindlessly following a set formula, or a new kind of car “imagined” by mechanically combining existing technological gimmicks. Conversely, one can be imaginative without using one’s “imagination”, insofar as the latter suggests both visualisation (or something like it) and premeditation. (An imaginative jazz solo might be entirely unpremeditated, for instance.) Unlike “imagination”, “imaginative” is typically valorific: To say that X is imaginative is to praise X (at least in that respect). My focus is imaginativeness, not imagination. Imagining possible futures is only interesting when it is done imaginatively. Indeed, the unimaginative imagining of the future – blindly assuming that it will (or will not) resemble the past in some predictable way – can be very dangerous indeed. My second distinction is between “imaginativeness” and “creativity”. Some philosophers use these two terms as synonyms, while others draw various distinctions between them (Paul and Kaufman 2014: 10; Audi, this volume). I artificially use them to capture a distinction between the practical and the (merely) speculative or theoretical. The morally imaginative person envisages new ethical possibilities, while the morally creative person puts them into practice. I do not claim that this captures the details of actual usage. But I do insist that the underlying distinction is an important one. My historical examples combine imagination, imaginativeness, and creativity. Plenty Coups had to imagine new ways forward for his people; he had to do so imaginatively – it was far from obvious what to do, and he had to take others with him – to transform his private imagining into a shared public moral experiment in living. The same is true of contemporary environmental activists. Both imaginativeness and creativity involve originality. Boden distinguishes two kinds of originality: historical and psychological (Boden 2014: 228). X is h-original if and only if X is new to human beings. No one has ever done, made, or thought this. X is p-original if and only if X is new for that person. She makes it up herself, having never seen anyone else do it. P-originality is the more basic phenomenon. Whatever is historically original is also psychologically original. The first time for anyone must be the first time for that person. H-originality is thus one very special class of p-originality. Even if our aim is to promote and enhance moral h-originality, we may do best by concentrating on promoting widespread p-originality.

Moral creativity and possible futures  353 Everyday moral life requires moral p-originality: each of us must learn to apply moral principles in new situations. And philosophical discussions of moral imagination typically focus on this very general capacity. My primary interest, however, is in moral h-originality: how does humanity as a whole (or some significant subset of it) learn new ethical lessons? I argue that historically original moral imaginativeness is increasingly important, both for our present ethical thinking about the future and for ethics within possible futures. My historical examples involve h-originality. Plenty Coups’ reimagining of Crow ethics was not just original to him – it wasn’t a familiar element of individual moral development within his culture, which only equipped Crow warriors to judge the requirements of courage in “business-asusual” situations. The early proponents of animal rights and eco-centrism went far beyond what their culture expected from a child learning to apply the Golden Rule. They were deliberately pushing familiar moral idioms in new and unexpected directions. On the other hand, moral creativity never takes place in a vacuum. My examples involve re-imagining, extending, adapting, modifying, or re-applying some existing store of familiar moral concepts, values, rules, principles, or idioms. Plenty Coups’s challenge, as he saw it, was to remain true to his ethical heritage, not simply to replace it with something entirely alien. (Abandoning his Crow identity altogether, and adopting Western values wholesale, would not represent a historically-original response to the threat of cultural annihilation!) Many environmental philosophers champion the rediscovery of earlier non-anthropocentric themes (e.g., Donner and Fumerton 2009: 125–143; and Brady 2011, borrowing from Mill and Hume, respectively). Even when environmental ethics presents itself as a complete break with an unacceptably anthropocentric past, it always actually draws on an existing moral inheritance, even if that borrowing is often highly abstract and selective. The stereotype of creativity is the individual genius working in glorious isolation. But moral creativity has several collective dimensions (Werhane 1999; Hargrave 2009). First, individual moral imaginativeness builds on inherited moral concepts. Even if those concepts could have originated as individual creations, their development and transmission is a collective enterprise. Second, several philosophers have argued that individual moral thought cannot exist without interpersonal deliberation, either because (for Wittgensteinian reasons) the development of any concept involves the following of rules and the recognition of constraints on one’s thinking that only a public language can provide (Pettit 1993), or because moral concepts in particular must be articulated, developed, and defended in the context of interpersonal justification and debate (Darwall 2009; Mulgan 2016b). If these arguments succeed, then no one could ever even

354  Tim Mulgan formulate an original ethical idea on her own. Third, individual creators are not ­necessarily the best judges of the value of their own creations. They may need others to tell them whether they have imagined something worthwhile. Finally, a theme of Mill’s On Liberty is that individual imaginativeness only flourishes against a sympathetic social background – otherwise it remains theoretical and satirical rather than constructive and practical. Experiments in living must be lived, not merely fantasised. Even if moral imaginativeness were purely individual, moral creativity is definitely not. Most serious moral experiments are inherently collective. They make sense only if widely adopted. Perhaps I can imagine a moral revolution on my own, but I cannot introduce any new social norm alone. Non-moral creativity also has a collective dimension (Kieran, this volume). Many of the arguments I have just given would apply equally well in non-moral cases. However, two are particular to moral creativity: the argument from second-personal justification, and the need for widespread social adoption to transform imaginativeness into creativity. Moral creativity is thus even more collective than creativity in general.3 To sum up: moral imaginativeness explores surprising new ways to develop or extend one’s existing store of moral concepts, values, norms, and idioms, while moral creativity puts moral imaginativeness into practice.

3 What moral imaginativeness is not Imaginativeness and creativity obviously matter to ethics. But moral imaginativeness is something more specific. Over the next two sections, I consider seven examples of morally relevant imaginativeness that are distinct from moral imaginativeness. The first two are uncontroversial. 1 Instrumentally valuable non-moral imaginativeness. Scientific, technical, administrative, social, or political imaginativeness is often essential to address moral or political problems. For instance, we cannot avoid climate change without many (as-yet-unimagined) technological and/ or political innovations. 2 Intrinsically valuable non-moral imaginativeness. Products of nonmoral creativity can be intrinsically valuable – either as components of human flourishing or as ends-in-themselves. And so can the creative process itself. (Gaut 2010; Grant 2012; Kieran 2014; Gaut, this volume.) It is good for me to think imaginatively; it is good that the world contains Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. My third example is more controversial, because many philosophers regard it as the core of moral imaginativeness.

Moral creativity and possible futures  355 3 Imaginative empathy. In philosophical discussion, “moral imagination” often refers to empathy. The ethically imaginative person sees things from someone else’s perspective, puts herself in their shoes, understands their worldview from the inside, and so on (Nussbaum 1995; Mackenzie and Scully 2007). The literature on the evolution, development, function, and value of human creativity also highlights the importance of imagining other people’s inner lives (Carruthers 2002; Picciuto and Carruthers 2014). Arguably, empathy is what imagination is primarily for. I believe that moral imaginativeness proper goes beyond empathy. I first separate three things often lumped together as “empathy” (once again, I do not claim that my terminology corresponds to current usage, but rather that it captures important distinctions): 1 Mindreading. The ability to see the world from another’s point of view, to imagine what the world looks like from her perspective, to recognise what strikes her as salient or valuable or important, and so on (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002). 2 Sympathy. “Fellow-feeling” or “feeling with”. For instance, on Hume’s classic account, I receive pleasure from another’s pleasure, pain from another’s pain (Brady 2011). 3 Evaluation. Judging that the other’s interests and perspective matter, in the same way that I matter, and that her moral standing, status, or significance are comparable to my own. Mindreading and sympathy are vital for any inter-personal activity, including ethics. But both are prima facie morally neutral. Mindreading is equally essential to the manipulative amoralist or the sadistic torturer, and sympathy (in my limited sense) can motivate one to avoid encountering another’s pain rather than alleviating it. (If there is a positive virtue of sympathy, then my “sympathy” is merely one of its necessary conditions.) Even when they are supplemented by evaluation, and therefore cease to be morally neutral, mindreading and sympathy remain distinct from moral imaginativeness. In principle, someone could be very imaginative in her mindreading and sympathy, and yet entirely conventional in her evaluations.4 By contrast, imaginative evaluation is a species of moral imagination – and one that comes to the fore in many possible futures, especially those involving unfamiliar entities whose moral standing is unclear.

4 More things that moral imaginativeness is not Moral imaginativeness is imaginative thinking about ethics. But not all imaginative thinking about ethics is moral imaginativeness. X is imaginative if and only if X is new, surprising, and valuable. It does not necessarily

356  Tim Mulgan follow that what is imaginative must always be morally valuable. Indeed, in some cases, the value in question is clearly not moral value. An imaginative torturer does well by the lights of torturing, a creative accountant promotes the value of tax avoidance, innovative reality television finds surprising new ways to humiliate idiots, and so on (Grant 2012: 277; Gaut, this volume; Livingston, this volume). Creativity about ethics need not be governed by ethical norms. We can imagine creative activities that have ethics as their domain, but are governed by non-moral (or immoral or amoral) norms. The rest of this section briefly explores four examples. (My argument is not that all four examples come apart from moral imaginativeness in practice, but that they are conceptually distinct from it.) 4 Creative moral theory. Like any other intellectual activity, moral philosophy can be done imaginatively. Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Parfit’s Reasons and Persons are creative achievements. But is this moral imaginativeness? Moral theory stands to first-order moral creativity in something like the same relationship that philosophy of art stands to first-order artistic creation or philosophy of science to first-order science. However, in the ethical case, the boundary between philosophy and practice is less clearly defined. In both art and science, there is no clear divide between practical creativity and theoretical innovation. Creative art or science often involves conceptual breakthroughs. These typically belong to the practice of the art or science itself, not to the philosophy of these activities. Thinking about art does not make the artist a philosopher of art; even the most conceptually sophisticated physicist may have no interest in the philosophy of science. As I argue in my discussion of future ethics below, creative first-order ethics can also demand conceptual innovation. But, in contrast to art or science, ethical theoretical innovation seems to fall within the traditional concerns of “moral philosophy” (or, at least, of “ethics”). On the other hand, clever innovation in the more abstract areas of moral philosophy may well turn out to be unrelated to moral imaginativeness. (Even the most thoughtful moral innovator may have no interest in analytic metaethics, for instance.) I conclude that, although imaginative moral theory and moral imaginativeness can overlap, they are distinct phenomena. In particular, we should not assume that training in academic moral philosophy is the best way to foster the development of moral imaginativeness. 5 Insensitive extrapolation. The application of familiar moral principles or values to new situations can simultaneously display both considerable imaginativeness and also a lack of moral sensitivity. Consider

Moral creativity and possible futures  357 a brilliant economist who ingeniously develops a model of society based on crude hedonic maximisation. As I explain below, I diagnose this as a failure to recognise that moral principles rest on contingent presuppositions. Imaginativeness shows one how ethics could be extended, but moral imaginativeness tells one why, in this particular case, it shouldn’t be. I am not sure whether this sort of failing is best regarded as failed or inept moral imaginativeness, as a vice of excessive moral theorising, or as a distinct kind of non-moral imaginativeness about the ethical. The important point is that one and the same activity could count as both good and imaginative moral theorising (in a particular tradition, at least) and also as bad moral imaginativeness. 6 Aesthetic experiments in living. Someone might adopt new values or norms for purely aesthetic (or other non-moral) reasons. (Consider the adoption of counter-cultural norms simply for the sake of variety.) These norms might be non-moral ones, such as dress, etiquette etc. But one could also, in theory, adopt a moral norm for non-moral reasons. (For instance, an existentialist hero might regard all conventional moral norms as empty, and then arbitrarily adopt one for aesthetic reasons.) It is not clear whether one could really adopt a moral norm as a moral norm (as opposed to a pose) without believing it to be correct. And, of course, most existential posturing is tediously unimaginative. But something of this kind could be done imaginatively, and that would be imaginativeness about ethics that fell short of moral imaginativeness. The morally imaginative person sees ethics from the inside, not from the outside. 7 Moral fiction. Novelists often invent new ethical outlooks for artistic purposes. When this is done imaginatively, moral-fiction-making is connected to moral imaginativeness. But the two remain distinct. Moral fiction can take several different forms. We are familiar with fictional characters who follow unfamiliar ethical norms, and with authors who make moral pronouncements we ourselves do not share. (Think of a novel by, or about, a defender of slavery.5) However, there are other, more controversial, kinds of “moral fiction”. The debate about “imaginative resistance” or “imaginative failure” deals with fictions where the author explicitly invites us to imagine a possible world whose moral facts differ from the actual moral facts (Gendler 2000; Brock 2012). One problem with this literature is the lack of uncontroversial actual examples. It is not clear whether anyone has ever set out to write this kind of moral fiction. Nonetheless, even if they are not common, such fictions are definitely possible.

358  Tim Mulgan We can divide this new kind of moral fiction into two genres, by e­ xtending a distinction between two familiar genres within science fiction.6 Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is a classic in the genre of counterfactual history. Published in 1963, it is set in an alternative present where Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide North America between them. Dick’s novel is a moral fiction only in the more familiar sense that many characters express moral views that we would find unacceptable. If Dick had instead written a counterfactual-present moral fiction, he would be inviting us to consider an alternative present where those deviant moral judgements are true. Most science fiction deals with possible futures rather than alternative presents. These are often futures whose inhabitants have very different values, norms, or moral beliefs from our own. To take one famous example, the original Star Trek, produced in 1960s America, imagined a future without racial bigotry. If this were a possible-future moral fiction, it would invite us to imagine that the moral facts in Captain Kirk’s world are different from those that are currently actually true in ours. But this was clearly not the intention of the makers of Star Trek. While they did invite their audience to embrace Star Trek’s possible future ethic, their goal was to replace current ethical beliefs because they were (already) false – not to imagine an alternative world where they would be false. Moral relativists would have no difficulty with either genre of moral fiction. If moral truth tracks majority moral opinion, then, in the world of The Man in the High Castle, it is a good thing that the Axis powers won the war. And if moral beliefs change in the future, then moral truth will change too. Our unwillingness to countenance moral fiction is thus further evidence that we do not endorse moral relativism. Moral realists will find moral fictions more disturbing. And ­counterfactual-present moral fictions seem more problematic than possible-future ones. The former contradict present moral facts, while the latter invite us to entertain the hypothesis that moral truth can change according to circumstances. Moral fictions are fascinating, and they are clearly relevant to moral creativity. In particular, both moral creativity and possible-future moral fiction begin by imagining how ethics might develop in the future. Moral fiction could be one way to explore or develop one’s moral imaginativeness, but moral fiction is not itself moral imaginativeness. One crucial difference is practical. An author of moral fictions may have no interest in actual moral reform, whereas moral imaginativeness proper typically aims to lead to moral creativity. I conclude that moral fiction is in the same boat as moral philosophy: it may often overlap with moral imaginativeness, but it is important to keep the two conceptually distinct.

Moral creativity and possible futures  359

5  Ethics within broken futures Different possible futures raise different imaginative challenges. We therefore cannot side-step the need for future moral creativity by pre-programming future ethics. We can only equip our descendants with moral imaginativeness – and hope that they exercise it well. In the next two sections, I explore several possible futures, beginning with one I have discussed extensively elsewhere. In my book Ethics for a Broken World, I imagine a future where resources are insufficient to meet everyone's basic needs, a chaotic climate makes life precarious, each generation is worse-off than the last, and our affluent way of life is no longer an option (Mulgan 2011, 2015a, 2015c, 2015d, 2016a). Philosophers in that broken world look back in disbelief at our lost age of affluence. Contemporary ethics presupposes that future people will be betteroff than present people, that the interests of different generations largely coincide, and that Rawlsian favourable conditions (Rawls 1971: 178) will persist indefinitely. My broken world removes these three presuppositions: future people are worse-off than present people, well-being continues to decline, the broken future was caused by intergenerational conflicts of interest, and favourable conditions are gone. (No broken society can meet all basic needs, and therefore none could possibly establish Rawlsian liberal institutions that both meet basic needs and protect basic liberties.) Broken world ethics demands moral imaginativeness, because it is not obvious how we can best preserve our affluent ethical traditions into a broken future. Elsewhere, I explore several places where current ethical thinking must be reinterpreted for a broken future. While some specific impacts of the broken world are predictable, others are more surprising. Consider those traditions in naturalistic meta-ethics that identify moral facts with the end-points of processes of empirical moral inquiry that may turn out to be inextricably linked to an unsustainable way of life (Mulgan 2015b: 38–44), the many strands of contemporary moral philosophy built on intuitions that are very closely tied to our affluent present (Mulgan 2015c), or modern theories of rights that implicitly presume a world where the central elements of a worthwhile life can be guaranteed to everyone (Mulgan 2011: 18–68). These familiar ethical ideas must all be re-imagined to fit a broken world. Thanks to the scarcity of material resources (especially water) and the unpredictable climate, broken world societies periodically face population bottlenecks where not everyone can survive. They must therefore institute survival lotteries – bureaucratic procedures that determine who lives and who dies. “Survival lottery” is a term of art. It need not imply any actual lottery. For instance, a libertarian survival lottery might allow the natural distribution of survival-chances to remain uncorrected. However, broken world liberals,

360  Tim Mulgan egalitarians, or contractualists, who seek a fair redistribution of the burdens imposed by scarce resources and chaotic climate may require literal lotteries. (For instance, a Rawlsian survival lottery must fairly distribute the benefits and burdens of both natural lottery and social cooperation.) Broken world ethics centres around the design of a just survival lottery. Future philosophers may draw inspiration from our own affluent debates about the role of lotteries in allocating our scarce resources – such as medical technologies, political offices, university places, or other limited opportunities (Goodwin 1992). The allocation of basic necessities to healthy adults in a broken world is arguably closer to our distribution of expensive medical treatment or donor organs than it is to our “normal” distributive justice. Because affluence is both a recent phenomenon and a geographically specific one, the broken future also has more in common with present non-affluent societies or with our own past. Broken world philosophers may find they have more to learn from pre-affluent philosophers such as Aristotle, Hume, or Kant, or from non-Western thinkers for whom hard choices were a fact of life. I explore the details of broken world ethics elsewhere. My central claim here is simply that preserving the essence of affluent ethics in such a world will demand moral creativity on a par with that displayed by Plenty Coups.

6  Moral creativity in technological futures If we knew which future would emerge, perhaps we could plan for it – focusing all our philosophical energy on resolving the questions that most matter in that particular future. But the possible futures are many, their comparative value is hard to discern, and each new generation will face its own new menu of possible futures. In this section, I briefly explore the need for moral imaginativeness in several possible futures based on credible extrapolations of current technological trends (Mulgan 2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2017). Suppose some future generation faces a choice between a broken reality and a virtual world where people have abandoned the real world altogether and spend their entire lives plugged into an experience machine that perfectly simulates any possible human experience (Nozick 1974: 42– 45). A perennial theme of science fiction is that adapting to life in a virtual environment would be very unsettling. It is not clear how we can best translate our familiar physical-world-based moral concepts into a virtual realm. Do virtual entities and events have the same moral status or significance as their real-world counterparts? Do virtual achievements count for anything? Even if they count for something, do they count as much as real ones? Is virtual adultery a real betrayal? Is virtual theft a crime? And so on. Until we answer these questions, we cannot evaluate the virtual future. We

Moral creativity and possible futures  361 must predict future people’s moral creativity before we know whether the virtual future should be welcomed or feared. One philosophical difficulty is that familiar moral considerations that typically go together now pull in very different directions. Depending on one’s theory of well-being, one may find the virtual world either ­unproblematically wonderful or extremely deficient (Mulgan 2014). The nature of human well-being is a site of perennial philosophical controversy. We are unsure what makes life worth living. Contemporary debate contrasts three positions: hedonism says well-being is pleasure and the absence of pain; preference theory says well-being is getting what you want; and the objective list theory offers a list of things that are good in themselves irrespective of the agent’s attitude to them, such as knowledge, achievement, friendship, and so on (Parfit 1984: 493–502; Crisp 2015). Ex hypothesi, life in my virtual future is phenomenologically indistinguishable from the “real thing”. We can also stipulate that, because this is all anyone has ever known, everyone is content with their lot. If we only look at the contents of experience or at individual preferences, then we cannot fault a present decision to avoid our obligations to future people by manipulating their psychology so that they never want the good things we destroy. Hedonists and preference theorists thus cannot object to the imposition of a virtual future. By contrast, many objectivists will find my virtual future very deficient. If a connection to the natural world is intrinsically valuable, then human lives go better (and perhaps can only go well) when they instantiate that value. Some things matter, and it matters that people are connected to real values, not virtual ones. We need moral imaginativeness to help us to resolve this radical disagreement about well-being. (This difficulty is especially acute for Rawlsian liberals and others who seek to remain agnostic between competing moral theories.) Now, suppose instead that the virtual future is unavailable, and future people can only escape a broken future by ushering in a digital future, where flesh-and-blood humans are replaced by intelligent machines or digital copies of human brains. (Perhaps we can upload, store, and run billions of digital copies, but we lack the resources to preserve many brains-in-vats plugged into experience machines.) How should we think about this choice? Are digital futures desirable? Can digital beings have valuable experiences or achievements? Are they conscious? Do either intelligent machines or digital humans have any phenomenological experience or inner life? Are digital beings persons? Is an uploaded copy of my brain the same person as me? Do algorithms, programmes, AIs, or digitally uploaded minds have rights? Do they matter? Do they matter as much as humans? (Or should they matter more?)

362  Tim Mulgan Some of these questions require philosophical imaginativeness. Insofar as they involve the practical reinterpretation of contested moral concepts, they also call for moral imaginativeness. In a digital future, physically embodied human society could be replaced by a community of uploaded minds. This reinvigorates the perennial utopian dream of a post-scarcity society where conflicts over scarce resources are a thing of the past. This optimistic opposite of the broken world is perhaps even more unsettling for the presuppositions of traditional moral and political thinking (Mulgan 2016a, 2017). The fact that future people will themselves have to exercise moral creativity reinforces the impossibility of predicting the future. If future events depend on future moral creativity, then we can only predict them if we can attach probabilities to all credible exercises of future moral creativity. And that seems hopelessly optimistic.7

7 Types of moral imaginativeness Possible futures demand several kinds of historically original moral imaginativeness: 1 Recognising the need for moral imaginativeness. We naturally treat our current moral principles, values, and moral status judgements as timeless and unconditional. Plenty Coups’s first insight was to recognise that the Crow moral worldview rested on contingent foundations that were about to disappear. And the inhabitants of broken, virtual, or digital futures must first recognise that the contingent presuppositions of our affluent, real-world, non-digital ethics are under threat. This demands imaginativeness, because the presuppositions of one’s current worldview are seldom obvious. The more pervasive a presupposition, the harder it is to imagine its absence. (After all, many not-otherwiseunimaginative affluent people are unable to take seriously the possibility that climate change might threaten favourable conditions.) 2 Drawing connections between disparate areas. If different moral principles rest on different presuppositions, then changing circumstances may bring different moral domains closer together. Sometimes the solution to a “new” problem is to find analogous existing problems. (As we saw in Section 5, the best analogue for broken world distributive justice may be affluent debates about scarce medical resources rather than our own distributive justice.) Because no two situations are ever exactly analogous, this requires moral imaginativeness. 3 Reimagining moral principles. All competent moral agents apply old principles to new technologies or social structures. (If you don’t see that lying by e-mail is no different from lying by letter, then you don’t

Moral creativity and possible futures  363 understand why lying is wrong.) Audi (this volume) notes that even this routine moral behaviour demands imaginativeness. H-original moral imaginativeness enters the picture when the presuppositions of a moral principle are challenged, and it is no longer obvious how to go on. Recognising the need for moral imaginativeness, and looking for possible existing analogues, is not enough. Sometimes, as in Plenty Coups’s case, one must imagine something entirely new. 4 Reimagining moral values. Technological and social innovations raise new questions about values. Is this new actual thing good? Would this newly imaginable possible thing be good? The values can be non-moral: Can videogames be beautiful? But they can also be moral: Can digital beings have rights? One intriguing question here is whether anyone could ever discover or invent new values – such as new items for our list of objective values or a new kind of pleasure? Even if such radical ex nihilo moral creativity is beyond human capacities, perhaps future non-human intelligences will create new values, alongside unimaginable (to us) ways to instantiate “our” values of achievement, friendship, or pleasure. 5 Reimagining moral status. This is a special case of the previous item. Who (or what) matters? Who can be a moral patient (an object of moral concern), or a moral agent (a subject of moral respect, a bearer of rights, a holder of duties)?

8 The need for moral imaginativeness about the future My possible futures are all familiar philosophers’ thought experiments. It is tempting to dismiss them for that reason. After all, no-one expects moral philosophy to offer guidance for every conceivable eventuality, or to perfectly fit all our intuitions about imaginary cases. However, my broken, virtual, and digital scenarios are also credible futures. No-one can reasonably be confident they won’t happen. The broken world involves no outlandish claims, scientific impossibilities, or implausible expectations about human behaviour. Climate change – or some other disaster – might produce a broken future. When Nozick first presented it in 1974, the experience machine was science fiction. In 2018, it is one credible future. Even if we discount the hype surrounding all new technologies, no-one can be sure that genuine virtual reality will not emerge. And even if perfect virtual reality does remain forever elusive, less-than-perfect experience machines could still be very appealing for future people living in (more or less) broken worlds. Finally, unconscious digital futures are credible. No-one can be confident that super-intelligent machines or digital uploads will never emerge. And digital beings might not be conscious. The question of machine consciousness is a site of reasonable philosophical disagreement. No-one knows whether consciousness

364  Tim Mulgan is simply a matter of patterns of information processing or an emergent ­feature specific to our biology (Mulgan 2014, 2016b, 2017). The transformation of imaginary thought experiments into credible futures raises the stakes for future ethics. Moral philosophy must help us to think clearly about our obligations regarding credible futures, especially when our present choices might harm future people or leave them ­unprepared to meet predictable new challenges. Moral imaginativeness enters our thinking about our obligations to future people in several ways. 1 Recognising the need for moral imaginativeness. Traditional moral theory sidelined intergenerational ethics because of three presuppositions: that the future will resemble the past (therefore, we don’t need special intergenerational principles); that future people will be betteroff (therefore, we can prioritise present needs); and that the interests of present and future people coincide (therefore, if we concentrate on the present, the future will take care of itself). Reflecting on credible futures undermines all three presuppositions. Future people could be much worse-off, our interests do not necessarily coincide, and their ethical challenges may be quite different. 2 Re-imagining intergenerational ethics. Once we recognise that our principles of intergenerational justice rest on questionable presuppositions, we must re-imagine them. This is an urgent task in both moral philosophy and practical politics. It demands moral creativity simply because, as ever, it is not obvious how to reshape our future ethics in light of possible broken, virtual, or digital futures. 3 Borrowing from future people. One fruitful resource for reimagining our obligations to future people is to borrow from their ethics. For instance, if the needs of “our world” include the needs of future people, and “our resources” include its future resources, then our world may be already broken. Perhaps, as well as imagining future survival lotteries, we need to implement a survival lottery now – rather than privileging the needs of present people over those of future people (Mulgan 2015a; 2016b). 4 Justification to future people. I argue elsewhere that we should seek to act in ways that we could justify to future people (Mulgan 2016b). Second-personal justification is a two-way street. So we must imagine future people’s responses, which in turn depend on their re-imagining of our moral principles. 5 Imagining future moral creativity. We cannot develop an ethic for the future without predicting the future of ethics. As we saw in Section 6, such prediction requires moral imaginativeness because both (a) we must predict future people’s moral creativity, and (b) this is itself an

Moral creativity and possible futures  365 exercise of moral imaginativeness. Fiction provides helpful analogies here. A bad writer can assert that Blogs is a creative genius – perhaps illustrating this with stereotypically absentminded behaviour. But it takes real creativity to present a fictional character's creative work – as a play within a play, or a poem within a novel, for instance. Good science fiction presents the moral creativity of its imaginary persons. (Indeed, a great nineteenth-century novelist could perhaps have invented Plenty Coups and his reimagining of Crow courage.) 6 Grouping possible futures. Finally, we need moral imaginativeness to partition the infinite space of possible futures and to group them into manageable categories. It is the ethical significance of their differences from our affluent present – lack of favourable conditions, conflicts between generations, intergenerational decline, etc. – that makes broken futures a salient category, virtual futures demand attention because the shift from real life to experience machine matters, and so on. If future people must be morally imaginative to face their challenges, and if we need moral imaginativeness to rethink our obligations to them, then one key question in future ethics is whether we can enhance either future people’s capacity for moral imaginativeness or our own. Moral education often seeks to suppress imagination about ethics. (A common non-philosophers’ objection to our use of baroque thought experiments is that it is dangerous to encourage people to rethink conventional moral commitments.) Some possible futures highlight this potential danger. If we mistakenly extend full moral status to digital beings who lack whatever it is that actually makes human lives morally valuable, then our sympathetic imaginativeness may make things worse rather than better. We need to encourage moral imaginativeness, not just any old imaginativeness about ethics. There is a substantial empirical and philosophical literature on the teachability of imagination, imaginativeness, and creativity in general, and on efforts to encourage empathy, sympathy, and mindreading (Gaut 2014; Audi, this volume). This literature suggests that there are things we could do to promote these general capacities. There is not much literature (so far as I am aware) on the teachability of moral imaginativeness in particular, and virtually none on moral h-originality. But this is the information we need, because encouraging people (or digital, virtual, or artificial beings) to be more imaginative and empathetic, and then just hoping this will lead to reliable moral improvement, is a very risky strategy indeed.8

Notes 1 One can also imaginatively describe an impossible state of affairs or tell an impossible tale. I set this complication aside, because impossible scenarios are unlikely to be relevant to moral imaginativeness, where the possibility of practical implementation is crucial. (I owe this point to Matthew Kieran.)

366  Tim Mulgan 2 While Boden’s definition is controversial, it will suffice for our purposes. (For other definitions, see: Kronfeldner 2009: 578; Gaut 2010: 1040; Grant 2012: 277; Kieran 2014: 127.) Paul and Kaufman note that: “There is an emerging consensus that a product must meet two conditions in order to be creative. It must be new, of course, but since novelty can be worthless (as in a meaningless string of letters), it must also be of value.” (Paul and Kaufman 2014: 6) My sense of “imaginativeness” also has affinities with Baehr’s “intellectual creativity” (this volume). (I am grateful to Berys Gaut for alerting me to this literature, and for pressing me to clarify my notion of imaginativeness.) 3 I am grateful to Matthew Kieran for pressing me on this point. One implication of the fact that moral creativity is especially collective is that, if Kieran’s argument in this volume is correct, then vanity is an even greater threat to creativity in the moral case. 4 On the limits of empathy as a guide to the value of non-human nature, see Holton and Langton 1998. 5 The classic example is Huckleberry Finn, whose stated moral beliefs (in favour of slavery) are in tension both with his creator’s presumed moral views and with his own moral dispositions and actions. 6 Both genres in the text are examples of grounded moral fictions, where changes in moral facts accompany changes in non-moral-facts—especially facts about people’s moral beliefs and practices. (A third genre of grounded moral fiction would involve metaphysical counterfactual claims. For instance, a theist who regards actual moral facts as facts about God might imagine a fictional Godless world where moral nihilism is true. This imaginative task is complicated, of course, by God’s necessary existence. But it is possible to tell an impossible fiction.) By contrast, an ungrounded moral fiction would ask us to imagine a fictional world exactly like the actual world in all non-moral respects, but still containing different moral facts. This is much harder to imagine, for reasons connected to the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral. 7 We might be able to predict the future if there were feasible shortcuts that would enable us to predict the behaviour of future people without imagining their creativity from the inside.The success of this strategy may turn on the possibility of successfully naturalising human creativity (Kronfeldner 2009). But as things stand, predictions of future creativity look pretty far-fetched. (The impossibility of prediction only applies to h-original creativity.The p-original creativity of children is often predictable by others. I owe this point to Berys Gaut.) 8 I am grateful to Berys Gaut, Mathew Kieran, and an audience at the University of St Andrews for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

References Boden, M. (2004) The Creative Mind, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. Boden, M. (2014) “Creativity and AI: A contradiction in terms?” in E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 224–244. Brady, E. (2011) “Adam Smith’s ‘sympathetic imagination’ and the aesthetic appreciation of environment,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 9: 95–109. Brock, S. (2012) “The puzzle of imaginative failure,” Philosophical Quarterly 62: 443–463. Carruthers, P. (2002) “Human creativity: Its cognitive basis, its evolution, and its connections with childhood pretence,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53: 225–249. Crisp, R. (2015) “Well-Being,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/sum2015/entries/well-being/. Currie, G., and Ravenscroft, I. (2002) Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Moral creativity and possible futures  367 Darwall, S. (2009) The Second-Person Standpoint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Donner, W., and Fumerton, R. (2009) Mill, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Ebenreck, S. (1996) “Opening Pandora’s Box: Imagination’s role in environmental ethics,” Environmental Ethics 18: 3–18. Gaut, B. (2003) “Creativity and imagination,” in B. Gaut and P. Livingston (eds.), The Creation of Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 148–73. Gaut, B. (2010) “The philosophy of creativity,” Philosophy Compass 5: 1034–1046. Gaut, B. (2014) “Educating for creativity,” in E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 265–287. Gendler, T. S. (2000) “The puzzle of imaginative resistance,” Journal of Philosophy, 97: 55–81. Goodwin, B. (1992) Justice by Lottery, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grant, J. (2012) “The value of imaginativeness,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90: 275–289. Hargrave, T. (2009) “Moral imagination, collective action, and the achievement of moral outcomes,” Business Ethics Quarterly 19: 87–104. Holton, R., and Langton, R. (1998) “Empathy and animal ethics,” in D. Jamieson (ed.), Singer and his Critics, Oxford: Blackwell. Johnson, M. (1993) Moral Imagination, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jonas, H. (1984) The Imperative for Responsibility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Kekes, J. (2006) The Enlargement of Life: Moral Imagination at Work, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kieran, M. (2014) “Creativity as a virtue of character,” in E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 125–144. King, R. (1999) “Narrative, imagination, and the search for intelligibility in environmental ethics,” Ethics and the Environment 4: 23–38. Kronfeldner, M. (2009) “Creativity naturalized,” Philosophical Quarterly 59: 577–592. Lear, J. (2008) Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mackenzie, C., and Scully, J. L. (2007) “Moral imagination, disability, and embodiment,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 24: 335–351. Mackie, G. (2000). “Female genital cutting: The beginning of the end,” in B. ShellDuncan and Y. Hernlund (eds.), Female Circumcision: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 245–282. Martin, M. (2006) “Moral creativity,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy 20: 55–66. Mulgan, T. (2011) Ethics for a Broken World: Reimagining Philosophy after Catastrophe, Durham, NC: Acumen.

368  Tim Mulgan Mulgan, T. (2014) “Ethics for possible futures,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114: 57–73. Mulgan, T. (2015a) “Mill and the broken world,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 69: 205–224. Mulgan, T. (2015b) Purpose in the Universe: The Moral and Metaphysical Case for Ananthropocentric Purposivism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mulgan, T. (2015c) “Theory and intuition in a broken world,” in S.-G. Chappell (ed.) Intuition, Theory, and Anti-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 141–166. Mulgan, T. (2015d) “Utilitarianism for a broken world,” Utilitas 27: 92–114. Mulgan, T. (2016a) “Theorising about justice for a broken world,” in K. Watene and J. Drydyk (eds.), Theorizing Justice: Critical Insights and Future Directions, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 15–32. Mulgan, T. (2016b) “Answering to future people,” The Journal of Applied Philosophy, online early. Mulgan, T. (2017) “How should utilitarians think about the future?,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 47: 290–312. Nozick, R. (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York: Blackwells. Nussbaum, M. (1995) Poetic Justice: the Literary Imagination and Public Life, Boston: Beacon Press. Parfit, D. (1984) Reason and Persons, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paul, E. S., and Kaufman, S. B. (2014) “Introducing The Philosophy of Creativity,” in E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3–14. Pettit, P. (1993) The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Picciuto, E., and Carruthers, P. (2014) “The origins of creativity,” in E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 199–233. Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singer, P. (1975) Animal Liberation, London: Cape, 1975. Stokes, D. (2014) “The role of imagination in creativity,” in E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity: new essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 157–184. Taylor, R. (1986) Respect for Nature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Werhane, P. H. (1999) Moral Imagination and Management Decision Making, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

21 Political creativity A skeptical view Matthew Noah Smith

1 Lee Bontecou’s striking and haunting piece, Untitled 1959/1960 is a three-dimensional piece of work rendered out of steel and canvas, framed and hung as if a normal painting. Taut, seemingly grimy canvas is fashioned, using steel armature and thin wire, into two volcanic cones, the centers of which are deep, black ovals. The ovals appear as limitless abysses piercing the space occupied by the artwork. When viewed in the white box of a gallery space, it feels as if Bontecou has rent a hole in the surface of reality to reveal a lurking, violent deep darkness. This piece, like much of Bontecou’s work in that era, embodied a startling mix of painting and sculpture. Viewed today, it remains surprising and aesthetically remarkable. Untitled 1959/1960 is a paradigm of the dominant contemporary philosophical understanding of creativity. This essay asks whether this model of creativity be applied to the political. I conclude that it cannot.

2 This section offers a brief overview of the standard philosophical account of creativity. This overview also has application to the accounts of creativity found in the psychological literature. The subsequent four sections offer more detail on the specific elements of this account. While these ­elements may not be found in every account of creativity, those theories of c­ reativity that reject one or more of them would likely present ­themselves as revisionist. Gaut’s (2010) survey of the philosophical literature and Mayer’s (1999) survey of the psychological literature supports this generalization, even though there are views rejecting one or more of these criteria, such as Briskman (1980) and Stokes (2011). So, while I am aware that there are other takes on creativity out there, my focus in this essay is on what I take to be standard approach to creativity. Creativity is almost always understood in terms of the creation of some output; Young (1985), Boden (1994), Boden (2004), Gaut (2009), Gaut (2010), Boden (2010), Gaut (2014), Paul and Kaufman (2014), and

370  Matthew Noah Smith Stokes (2016) are representative. Here, we should understand ‘output’ as ­something produced by but distinct from the productive process. The productive process is creative insofar as it generates an output with certain qualities. Even in cases in which a performance is the creative output, the creativity occurs prior to the performance and then is realized in the performance. One may object that sometimes the creation and the performance are simultaneous. If such cases exist, they are limit cases and as such are not paradigmatic instances of creativity. Furthermore, it is an open question whether they even exist. First, there is always a psychological process leading up to the creative performative output and creativity is found but not materially realized in that process. Second, and I think more importantly, the performer almost always has training and a history of previously creative performances. Such education and practice prior to the performance are arguably the moments in which the creative processes are realized. For, as we shall, in the absence of a kind of hermeneutical engagement with one’s productive activity – an engagement that is possibly largely only thanks to education and practice – the resulting output is better understood as luckily novel and valuable, and not novel and valuable in the sense that creative output is. This point cannot be settled here. What matters is that these reservations are sufficient for us to view supposed cases of simultaneity in creative process and performance as the kind of hard cases that make bad philosophy, i.e., the kind of cases that should not guide reflections about standard forms of creativity. As suggested by the Bontecou example, the typical characterization of creativity is as a capacity possessed by a person, and as activated when that person produces some output through the exercise that capacity.1 Thus, Margaret Boden uncritically locates creativity in individual “[i]nventors, scientists, and artists…” (Boden 2004: 75). Berys Gaut concurs: “Creativity is a property of agents, not of mere things or plants…” (Gaut 2010: 1040). Similar views are expressed in the psychology of creativity (see Carruthers 2006: chapter 5). There are some challenges, such as in Briskman (1980), which locates creativity in outputs and not psychological processes. And while Stokes (2008) appears to agree, arguing that agents, processes, and products exhibit crucial features of creativity, he later argues that creativity depends “non-accidentally upon agency.” (Stokes 2011: 658). Additionally, this agential understanding of creativity should be conditioned by the standard philosophical account of agency. According to such accounts, individual, intentional actions are agency’s fundamental expression. So, in virtue of creativity being agential, it is specially linked to intentional action. Finally, the standard view is that creative output has certain qualities partially in virtue of which the creative process is an instance of creativity.

Political creativity  371 Although the question of what those qualities are is a matter of some dispute, Boden (1994), Boden (2004), and Boden (2010) seems to have defended the most influential account of these creativity-realizing qualities as newness and being valuable. These metrics are challenged, and other metrics are defended and discussed in, e.g., Gaut (2010), Kieran (2014a), Kieran (2014b), Hills and Bird (this volume), Livingston (this volume), but there are no widely accepted alternatives that are significantly different from Boden’s. Furthermore, the resolution of this dispute is immaterial to the overall argument of this essay. In sum, then, creativity is a capacity possessed by an individual agent who, through intentional actions, produces some sort of novel, valuable output. Lee Bontecou’s Untitled 1959/1960 is an expression of creativity because it is the novel, valuable output of the Bontecou’s intentional actions, where those actions amounted to the employment of her capacity for creativity.

3 Let us look more closely at the way creativity is understood in terms of individual agents. While philosophers of creativity have no difficulty allowing that the cultural environment can be an accelerant to creativity, that environment cannot be treated as a proper part of the capacity for creativity. For, cultural milieus are not themselves proper parts of agents but are instead products of human agency. That there is a feedback loop such that the outcome of an activity can become a stimulus of another activity does not thereby transform the outcome into a component of an agent. Following Fred Dretske’s familiar distinction between triggering and structuring causes (see Dretske 1988: 43ff.), the triggering cause of a creative output is (something internal to) the individual agent, whereas the culture and so on are structuring causes. Thus, even if certain cultural conditions are necessary for creativity, it remains the case there is an important distinction between the way that creativity runs through the individual creator and the role that cultural milieu plays in creative activity.2

4 As mentioned in Section 2, the centrality of agency to creativity invites reflection on the intentionality of creativity. To begin with, note that accidental behavior is not creativity-realizing. Gaut (2010) gives an example along the lines of wind knocking over paint cans carelessly abandoned outside, with the resulting spill is formally identical to a wildly creative instance of painting that is, at that very moment, being produced by a creative artist, such as Kehinde Wiley. This accidental spreading of paint

372  Matthew Noah Smith is not an instance of creativity. But, the formally identical painting Wiley shows a few days later is an instance of creativity. The lesson that theorists draw from this is that creativity is a kind of skill that is intentionally exercised (see, e.g., Stokes 2011). Some, such as Kieran (2014b), take this as evidence that creativity might be something like an Aristotelian virtue. On all these views, creative activity is always a kind of intentional action. The same point applies to foreseen but unintended side-effects of intentional creativity. Suppose that in producing David, Michelangelo chipped off marble that happened to be formally identical to Brâncusi’s Portrait of Mademoiselle Pogany. Michelangelo, as he chipped away, saw a piece of marble with a certain shape getting chipped off the large marble block, but didn’t in any way care about the specifics of that marble chip. He was only interested in what was left over. He was concentrating intently on producing his massive sculpture of the boy soldier and not on the entire shapes of pieces he was chipping off. So, he did not intend to chip off a piece with that shape (even if he intended to chip off a piece that was partially that shape). So, although Brâncusi’s Portrait of Mademoiselle Pogany is a work of great creativity, Michelangelo’s chipped piece of marble, which is formally identical to Portrait of Mademoiselle Pogany, is not because it was not intentionally produced.

5 Given that the paradigmatic intention is a product of some sort of deliberation, there seems to be a distinctively intellectual character to creativity.3 To develop this point, it is useful to consider whether someone can intend to be creative, full stop, and thereby be creative. Insofar as creativity is intentional, people intend to do things creatively (although probably not under that description). For example, presumably Merce Cunningham intended to create a new form of choreography. He reflected on how to do that and this led him to develop his Chance Method. This critical engagement with some practice is a kind of deliberation, where the characteristic output is an intention – in the case the intention to choreograph a dance using dice (N.B.: this is a simplification of the method). In particular, as Stokes (2011) details in a lengthy argument against Kivy (2001), and as we see in the excellent discussion in Hills and Bird (this volume), to be creative, one must engage one’s work on the terms of some practice. If one simply refused to do this on the grounds that one intends ‘to break the mold’ or ‘to challenge the dominant paradigm’, then, it’s unclear whether one will end up doing anything at all. For, to seek to escape a dialectic engagement with those who came before is a recipe for doing nothing at all. How does one even conceive of an activity without relying on past practice? Thus, early filmmakers thought of their work in terms

Political creativity  373 that were familiar to them (theater, painting, photography, etc.). They did not simply invent filmmaking out of whole cloth, with no reference to existing practices. Even radical inventions within the practice of filmmaking, such as Eisenstein’s invention of the montage, were understood by reference to existing practices.4 In this respect, creativity seems to require intentional engagement with existing norms of one’s practice. So, creativity is intellectual in the sense that one is aware that one is engaging in some practice and one is critically engaging with the norms of that practice. Creativity always involves some sort of ‘looking forward’ in one’s practice. The creative activity is not realized in the context of constant dwelling on what one has just done – a kind of reflective repose. In this way, creativity involves a kind of cognitively informed, intellectually critical foresight.5 This helps us situate creativity in relation to imaginativeness, with which it has long been associated (see, e.g., Currie 1995, Funkhouser and Spaulding 2009, Gaut 2009 and Stokes 2014).6 Although imaginativeness itself is a matter of some debate in philosophy (see Gendler 2011), let us understand imaginativeness as something like the capacity to call to mind novel scenarios of one’s practice. Imaginativeness is therefore a feature of a certain kind of intellectual activity embedded within a practice. For, the imaginative person is both aware that she is engaging in a certain practice and critically guiding herself within that practice (see Gaut 2009). On this view, imaginativeness – even if its instantiation has the phenomenology of a flash of inspiration – emerges in the context of slow labor characterized by thoughtfulness, preparation, effort, reflection, revision, and so on. This environment is ideal for “slow” cognitive processes explicitly represented in one’s consciousness and subject to executive control. So, creativity understood as an expression of imaginativeness supports our interpretation of it as essentially intellectual.

6 Finally, pretty much all accounts of creativity assume that it aims at an output distinct from the creative process (see Stokes 2016 and Hills and Bird, this volume). While it is true that on these accounts a person can have a capacity for creativity, and we typically use the term ‘creative’ to describe people with that capacity, creativity is only realized in something that is separable from the creative process itself, namely the output of that process. One can, of course, creatively be creative (“the way he imagines new forms of painting is in itself wildly imaginative!”), but, the possibility of creative creativity is just a case of creativity being realized in output twice over. In this case, the creative process itself is an output of a previous creative process, and then the subsequent novel, surprising, and valuable product of that novel, surprising, and valuable creative process is yet another output.7

374  Matthew Noah Smith

7 As should be clear, the individualist, intentional, and intellectual features of creativity are all interlinked. They are co-packaged because the paradigm of creativity is the individual agent, through planned engagement with some practice, producing a novel, valuable output. These are the central features of creativity that must be realized in political creativity, if there is such a thing.

8 To begin to explore the possibility of political creativity, let us distinguish the political from simple interpersonal morality. Morality, as it is typically presented in contemporary philosophy, is concerned with small-bore phenomena: personal virtues and one-off interpersonal interactions, while the political, on the other hand, is concerned with the structural, the social, and the systemic. Consider, for example, the distinction between the brutal simplicity and context-free Trolley Problem and the rich tapestry of social contract theorists’ detailed explorations into the sources, nature, and justification of political society. Insofar as the political is concerned with the structural, then, I mean that it is concerned with historically situated, socially produced institutions that, through the generation of both norms and mass ideology, directly shape people’s lives in ways that ensure the reproduction of that institution itself.8 For example, a state, in virtue of its (unhidden) practice of producing norms and ideology, is a structural phenomenon, whereas a friendship is not.9 The economy, insofar as we understand it as a system of norms realized in a vast complex of production and market practices, is a structural phenomenon since it produces the conditions of its own reproduction.10 Abstractions, like the concept of the theater, are not structural. But, Broadway, understood as the institution of high-cost theatrical productions based around Times Square, NYC, is structural. The same point can be made about the family. The abstraction – the concept of networks of biologically related organisms – is not structural. But, as Pateman (1988) and Moller Okin (1989) famously explained in their challenges to certain forms of liberalism, the family as it is actually realized in society is always structural. In other words: theory that focuses on the political focuses on social institutions that are of a certain genus. Since structural phenomena are social, they are constituted by more than mere one-off interpersonal interactions. Contrast this with Trolley problems and “Terror Bomber” vs. “Strategic Bomber” cases. These thought experiments are quintessentially part of the practice of moral theory. They ask us to understand its subjects abstractly, to treat the persons involved as no more than open variables. The political, on the other hand, treats all normative questions as grounded in the thick fabric of

Political creativity  375 historically grounded relationships. The very question of the normative relationship between the law and some person presupposes a specific contingent relationship between the person the institution producing the law (like, for example, that this person has freely entered the territory governed by that law).11 The sociality of the political is not a matter of mere passing interaction; it is richly constituted. Insofar as the political is systemic, the phenomenon in question requires a high level of penetration into a population’s life such that the normative characteristics of systemic phenomena govern a significant number of characteristics in the lives of the members of that population. So, for example, the state is obviously systemic in this sense. But, so is the economy.12 On the other hand, in many contemporary secular societies, religions typically aren’t systemic since they explicitly restrict their normative requirements to adherents. In non-secular political communities, on the other hand, religion is systemic. Arguably, morality is systemic, in the sense that its norms apply to all persons. So, we cannot use just this criterion to distinguish morality from the political. But, this criterion is nonetheless an important feature of the political. One might object to my distinction between the political and the moral by appeal to the long tradition in philosophy of treating morality as an outgrowth of the political (see, e.g., the work of Hume; Nietzsche; some interpretations of Marx; certain interpretations of Kant, such as Herman 1993; or morality as classical utilitarians understood it). In these cases, though, it seems that a distinctive sphere of morality is lost, and not that the political collapses into the moral. So, I do not see the distinction drawn here as unwarranted. We are typically quite comfortable thinking about, say, virtues, hurt feelings, and the nature of promissory obligation, as within the realm of morality, and thinking about justice, oppression, and the nature of the obligation to obey the law as within the realm of the political. The three distinguishing features of the political – that it is structural, socially constituted, and systematic – just described help us to draw these lines.13

9 To get clearer on where creativity must be located for there to be political creativity, I shall introduce four categories: the political concept, the political practice, the practical understandings of that practice, and the popular understandings of the practice. To illustrate these categories, consider the case of human rights:14 The concept of human rights is (roughly) the concept of the basic rights someone has in virtue of being human. This is essentially an intellectual phenomenon.15

376  Matthew Noah Smith The practice of human rights is the regulation of state, firm, and individual activity by human rights norms. This is collectively realized through innumerable instances of advocacy and litigation explicitly employing norms institutionalized in international, transnational, and national governmental, as well as regulatory and other state and quasi-state structures. The practical understandings of human rights are the hermeneutical understandings possessed by those who engage in the practice of human rights. The popular understandings of human rights are the multifaceted, conflicting, and narratively rich understandings that laypersons have of human rights.

The concept of human rights as described above is an intellectual phenomenon, not a political one. It merely refers to the political. The concept of human rights therefore can fit into the standard model of creativity. Some philosopher publishing many essays on the nature of human rights may earn many citations in top-ranked journals, provide semesters’ worth of heated seminar room debates in universities across the world, and be the basis for glowing and highly convincing tenure letters. This would count, by at least the standards of the academy, as a great achievement. But, it would not be an instance of political creativity.16 The second category refers to actually existing structures, not concepts or ideals. It is essentially contingent, in the sense that it has the determinate form – the contingent particularity – that all objects have.17 It follows that the second category captures the political nicely: it is structural in that it is an institution that produces the conditions of its own reproduction; it is socially constituted, and it is systemic, in the sense that it aims to govern vast swaths of people’s lives. The character the institution of human rights depends upon the selfunderstandings of its practitioners. Thus, the second and third categories above are co-realized. There can be no practice of human rights without the practitioners having a certain self-understanding of themselves as practitioners. Nonetheless, these are distinct phenomena, as the selfunderstandings can be quite varied and non-factive.18 Properly characterizing a political practice, then, requires managing the heterogeneity of practitioners’ self-understandings. On the other hand, the self-understandings of institutional actors are not themselves instances of the political. They are individualistic psychological phenomena. An individualistic psychological phenomenon cannot be structural, social, or systemic.19 Such individualistic phenomena can be among the building blocks of the social, but they are not themselves social. Furthermore, such phenomena can also be expressions of structural, social, or systemic phenomena. But that again does not make them structural, social, or systemic phenomena themselves. So, even when the way in which practitioners think about their practice has political consequences, those

Political creativity  377 self-understandings are not instances of the political. A practitioner may just understand herself as doing a boring job she hates, and thereby see her activity as a rote and mechanical performance of rule-following. This is rampant in all levels of bureaucracies, and especially in the large bureaucracies that constitute the international human rights practice. Politically potent concepts like the concept of human rights are always operationalized along procedural lines specified by the black-letter regulations produced by other teams upon teams of other faceless, bored bureaucrats. Participants in government agencies, national and international juridical regimes, transnational NGO’s and protest organizations, and other plainly political phenomena thereby can come to understanding their “human rights work” in entirely procedural terms. Predictably, high-minded discussions with such people often become one-sided and tedious recitations of the correct ways to initiate claims, the proper fora in which to file different claims, strict and notional timetables about hearings, and so on. One upshot of this is that the actual practice of the human rights regime can itself be utterly non-political, in the sense that it is little more than the activity of bureaucrats. This can apply as much to legislators and lobbyists as it does to those who process minor forms associated with legal cases or the receipt of protest letters. This may have serious political consequences, e.g., it might alienate those for whom the human rights practitioners aim to be advocates or it might sap institutional energy when that energy is most urgently needed. So, when this apolitical self-­understanding is properly contextualized within the broader political practice – i.e., within the phenomena identified in category two above – these individuals’ apolitical self-understandings are manifestations of the political. But, it is only once we firmly connect the individual ideas persons have about themselves and their lives with broader structural phenomena that those ideas become recognizable as elements of the political. For another illustration of how the self-understandings of practitioners can be apolitical, consider the example of mass policing in the modern state. Police officers, although the tip of the spear when it comes to the application of state power, often fail to think politically about their activity. Rather, their self-understandings are utterly procedural. Thus, it is often pointless to criticize policing activity as, for example, racist. For, many police are apt only to understand their activity as procedurally sound or unsound. An intervention is required to awaken police so that they break free of the apolitical, bureaucratized understanding of their activity and come to see it as a part of a historically constituted, and normatively thick political practice. Finally, there is the last category, the example of which I have given is a collection of individualistic takes on human rights. These are just the sorts of mental states that might be creatively produced and that

378  Matthew Noah Smith therefore might be instances of creativity. But, they are not political phenomena because they are neither social, nor structural, nor systemic. Rather, they are what we tell ourselves about the political order. These narratives may be co-produced in classrooms, in the media, and so on, but they are taken up and mobilized intellectually at the individual level. Thus, like the third category, these also may have political upshots under certain conditions, but like the hermeneutically constructed selfunderstandings of practitioners of human rights, they are not themselves political. In sum, the only category that refers to intrinsically political phenomena is the second one. All the other categories are political in relation to the second category. Thus, if political creativity is possible, we shall find it in the second category.

10 So, can we apply the standard model of creativity to the political? I am pessimistic. For, the standard model of creativity is individualistic. But, the political, by its very nature, resists understanding in individualistic terms. So, any plausible, much less any attractive, theory of political creativity must build across this gulf a rather substantial theoretical bridge. I do not believe that we currently have the resources to construct such a connection, even given the diverse and attractive philosophical models of group agency now available. Furthermore, merely paying lip service to the possibility of political agency is not sufficient. Any respectable model of political creativity must do the hard work of showing institutionally constituted multitudes can be agents, have intentions, and be imaginative, and in the ways in which would it apt to ascribe creativity to them. And, while there has been some discussion of how we might conceive of collective creativity (Sawyer 2008; Fischer and Vassen, eds. 2011; Sanino and Ellis, eds. 2014), these volumes are outside the discipline of academic philosophy. So, it would be a complicated matter to determine whether these accounts of collective creativity sit happily with the views developed by philosophers of creativity. For example, Berys Gaut’s work on creativity plays almost no role in the discussions of creativity in these volumes. So, given the current state of research into the possibility of non-individualistic agency, mental states, and processes, all we can do now either is (i) posit without justification the existence of agency, intentionality, and imaginativeness at the political level; (ii) radically alter our understanding of creativity so that it can be applied to the political; or (iii) reserve judgment about whether the concept of political creativity successfully refers or is even coherent. The first option is under-motivated. The second is

Political creativity  379 unmotivated. Only the third is currently attractive. We should therefore be skeptics with respect to political creativity. The remainder of the essay makes a detailed case for this conclusion.

11 I remind the reader that our concern is not here with creativity with respect to some political idea or with respect to the execution of some institutional action. Mary Wollstonecraft was in the former sense politically creative when she wrote a Vindication of the Rights of Women, and Johnnie Cochrane was creative in the latter sense when he used an ingenious strategy in successfully defending OJ Simpson. But, these are not the forms of political creativity that interest me. Rather, our focus is on whether political institutions and political processes can be creative. The first disjunction between standard forms of creativity and the political is at the level of the agent. While there is some philosophical debate about what an individual is and what an agent is, at the grain of inquiry at which philosophy of creativity proceeds there is no dispute. What is employed is an intuitive concept of the individual person that is as familiar as any concept is. We can without too much difficulty ascribe mental states, mental processes, actions, and responsibility to this agent. Central to the attractiveness of almost every extant philosophical account of creativity is the assumption that when it comes to making sense of what an individual agent is, in the paradigm case of the creative this is philosophically unproblematic, or at least there is no special problem. This is why there is such an easy slide from philosophy of creativity to the psychology of creativity (see almost all contemporary work in the philosophy of creativity), the neuroscience of creativity (see, e.g., Dietrich 2004), and the computer science of creativity (see Boden 1998 and 2009). For all of these disciplines are individualistic in character, in the sense that they more or less unproblematically posit the individual agent as the site of the subject of research. The same cannot be said about group agents and political agents. For, while we do have an intuitive notion of the political agent, even our modestly sophisticated accounts of group agency face immediate and quite vicious problems (see List and Pettit 2011). Most notably, the very materiality of the collective agent can be questioned, whereas the intuitive and intellectual basis of ascription of individual agency just is the materiality of the individual human body. The undeniable physical presence of the body in which creative processes supposedly occur is part of why it is so unproblematic for philosophers (and other theorists) of creativity to posit the individual as the locus of creativity. The absence of such a body – the body politic is a fiction and has been understood as such by many if not

380  Matthew Noah Smith most political theorists – therefore presents an immediate and powerful discontinuity between our intuitions about individual agency and institutional agency. Thus, in Tuomela (1989: 471), we read that, “Persons have (biological) bodies and perform bodily actions in contrast to collectives… [A] collective is not a self-sufficient agent (e.g., in the sense of being capable of performing basic bodily actions).” The absence of the corporeal makes skepticism about political agents quite natural – something that must be overcome instead of something that can be dismissed with a wave of a hand and a citation to a single article. For example, some of our best empirical accounts of nations, which are often taken to exist prior to the political agent, have argued that they are fictions created for the sake of social control, as clearly illustrated in Anderson (2006). Even optimistic accounts of group agency that reject this fictionalist approach nonetheless are committed to a kind of individualism that leaves little room for the robust sort of emergentism that would make political creativity sui generis as opposed to a mere amalgamation of instances of individual creativity. In the mid-twentieth century, Popper (1945), Garfinkel (1967), and most importantly Watkins (1955) labeled as “pre-scientific” any accounts of “group spirits” (Popper’s term) that cannot be wholly explained in terms of the individual. Thus, J. W. N. Watkins writes that “the ultimate constituents of the social world are individual people who act more or less appropriately in the light of their dispositions and understanding of their situation” (Watkins 1957: 106). The same sentiment is found in contemporary social theory, such as Elster (1982), although see Pettit (2009) for complications. Today, although most leading philosophical attempts at theorizing group agency have abandoned simplistic forms of methodological individualism, they nonetheless hew to a similar, but weaker methodological principle that group agency supervenes on individual agency. Searle (1995) and Searle (2009) defend a ‘naturalist’ view of group agents, denying that in any fundamental sense there are supraindividual agents, but at the same time holding that collective recognition of something having a certain status can give that thing ‘social reality’ at least partially in the form of certain ‘deontic powers’, or more simply, in terms of that thing having certain rights, privileges, duties, etc., with respect to individuals and other groups. Thus, the state, for example, has actual deontic powers but its existence as such depends upon individual mental states. Similarly, Tuomela (2013) both firmly rejects methodological individualism but also does not argue that group agents are so metaphysically independent of individual agency that it makes sense to treat them as robustly isomorphic to individual agents. The upshot of this is that while it is certainly possible that massive, diversely constituted group agents, constituted in any of the myriad of ways that contemporary philosophers have imagined they could be

Political creativity  381 constituted, might have some sort of capacity for creativity, it does not follow from a simple punning on the word “agency” that political agents (assuming they exist) have the same capacities as the individual agents on which they supervene. The philosopher of creativity facilely relies on such a pun when she does not do the legwork to show that massive group agents, constituted in at least one of the many and often incompatible ways that group agency has been theorized, have the same or enough of the same psychological properties as have individual agents, such that ascription of creativity to group agents is warranted. And, as of this writing, no philosopher of creativity has done this legwork.

12 Even the briefest dive into the guts of theories of group agency reveals deep problems for a theory of political creativity. For, while almost all theories of group agency rest on theories of collective intentionality, that is where agreement, such as it is, gives way to a welter of contestation (see Chant, Hindriks, and Preyer [2014], Cohen [1989], and Cohen [1995]). All argue that talk of “group thought” cannot be taken literally on pain of illicitly anthropomorphizing groups, which we are here allowing exist. That is, even if groups – fans of a sports team, nations, states, political institutions, etc. – exist, they are so sufficiently unlike human beings that it would be an error to ascribe mental states and mental processes to them. To say these groups have intentions is to speak loosely. Really, there are just individuals with appropriately interlocking intentions (see Bratman 2007). If this view of collective intentionality is correct, then all talk of political creativity is subject to the same objection. For creativity is a psychological phenomenon, and one that is vastly more complicated than mere belief or mere intention. So, if all collective intentionality is to be reduced to interlocking individual intentions – if all collective intentions are not strictly analogous to individual intentions – then only loose analogies can be drawn between theories of individual creativity and political creativity. As mentioned above, even though the “big four” theorists of collective intentionality – Gilbert (1989), Bratman (2013), Searle (2009), Tuomela (2013) are representative texts – limit individualism by requiring a commitment by individual agents to an unreduced group entity or group interest whose existence in turn depends upon these commitments, they firmly resist positing a form of group intentionality strictly isomorphic to individual intentionality. For example, recall Searle (1990)’s famous example of unrelated people in a park sprinting all at once for the same shelter when the rain starts. It may appear that there is something shared going on, and each of their intentions may refer to some of the same things, but the intentions do not display the

382  Matthew Noah Smith robust interconnectedness that is required for collective ­intentionality. That is why theories of collective intentionality always require either shared reference to some social entity that is collectively constituted (e.g., a ‘we’-activity, a ‘we’-intention, a group, an institution, a social rule, etc.). This facilitates, at the very least, the sort of mutual responsiveness that is an essential characteristic of joint action realized via collective intention. As Smith (2006) shows, this also requires a nontrivial form of conceptual agreement amongst the participating agents. This conceptual agreement, in turn, requires both co-extensionality and intensional coher­ ence of the agents’ relevant beliefs and intentions (see also Coleman and Simchen 2003). If two parties are going to engage in a joint intentional activity, then each must have the intention “I intend that we J” which should be understood at least partially in terms of the intention “I intend to J in response to her intention to J.” At first blush, it seems sufficient for shared activity if the two parties’ concepts of J-ing are extensionally equivalent.20 And, if this were sufficient, then mere extensional equivalence and not conceptual coherence would be required. For there easily can be cases of extensional equivalence with intensional incoherence (I discuss a case below). But, as is clear from Bratman’s (1992) discussion of joint intentional action and shared cooperative activity, what makes joint and shared intentions collective in the meaningful sense we want is the fact that they are interlocking in the right sort of way. And this requires that each party’s intention successfully refer to the other parties’ intentions: “I intend to J in response to her intention to J” must be such that “her intention to J” refers to the other party’s intention to J. Another way to say this is to say that our intentions are not mediated entirely by the action we intend to perform, but are in fact more directly related in virtue of the fact that they refer to each other. But, in order to refer successfully, the intension of “J” in her intention to J has at least to cohere with the intension of “J” in my intention to J or else my concept her intention to J will not get mapped onto her intention to J. Mere co-extensionality will not do.21 Thus, for parties who are J-ing together, their concepts of J-ing have to intensionally cohere as well as be extensionally equivalent. In fact, the higher standard of intensional equivalence is arguably required. For, responsiveness to the intentions of others is more important for collective intentionality than is to responsiveness to the actions of others. This is because people’s actions can be imperfect realizations of their intentions. Mere coherence creates space where two people, inexpertly trying to enact radically different intentions end up responding to each other in such a way as to appear to one another that they have a collective intention. But, in fact they don’t. This is a premise for certain comedic scenes in which two bumbling characters appear to each other to be in cahoots with each other but in fact are natural enemies.

Political creativity  383 For example, if I believe that I am playing a game of basketball against you and you believe that we are just practicing driving to the basket, it is only at a fairly high level of abstraction that we can be said to be doing something together. At best, we share only an intention to be on the court engaging in basketball moves with each other. But, when I foul you hard as you drive to the basket and say that I was trying to prevent you from winning the game, you would be correct in observing that all along it turns out we weren’t playing a basketball game together at all, even though outwardly it appeared as if we were. This is a case of a lack of intensional coherence with extensional equivalence. Such lack of coherence can block the sort of interlocking psychological attitudes on which collective intentionality depends.22 So, while joint action need not require shared goals or beliefs among the collective, it does require intentions that are responsive to one another via coherent descriptions. This in turn suggests that these models of collective intentionality are most felicitously applied to small interactive groups for whom such coherence would not be overly demanding. Hierarchical structures in which information is not shared, the employment of ‘essentially contested’ concepts at the heart of the activity, and other normal features of political communities typically do not allow these conditions to be met (but see Shapiro 2011 and Shapiro 2014 for work on resolving these difficulties without departing significantly from the Bratmanian tradition). Similar problems arise in even our most sophisticated accounts of conventional social norms. These accounts – Lewis (1969), Cubitt and Sugden (2003), and, for an overview, Vanderschraff and Sillari (2014) – typically rely on some sort of common knowledge requirement, which is cashed out in terms of each participant being aware that other participants believe the same relevant things about the coordination problem and its solution, and furthermore are aware of each other’s beliefs about each other, and so on. This is a very difficult condition to meet. It is unlikely that they would be met given the number and diversity of all the actors in contemporary political institutions, which are vast, complicated, and riven with fairly basic disagreements even about the function of those institutions. Finally, even if we put aside worries about collective intentionality, new problems crop up. For, as we’ve seen, creativity involves complex forms of representation associated with both creativity’s intellectual engagement with some practice and the imaginativeness involved in being creative. So, not only must the political institution settle on a unified end via some process of collective intention formation, but it must be able to form representations about what it is doing and how that relates to numerous practice-related phenomena. But, what is it for a group to have even a single belief, much less to have the sort of complex representations that sustain a creative process? We have long known that plebiscites are poor

384  Matthew Noah Smith methods for arriving at collective representations. As Condorcet (1785) and Arrow (1951) famously showed, and as we see from more recent work such as Russell, Hawthorne, and Buchak (2014), they are subject to many paradoxes. So, even if we have a theory of collective intentionality that allows for isomorphism between group intentions and individual intentions, there remain quite vast hurdles for any theory of political creativity such that the representations necessary for creativity are realized in political institutions in a manner sufficiently similar to the individual forms of representation such that the two processes merit a univocal accounting. In sum, philosophers of creativity should neither ignore the questions surrounding group agency and collective intentionality, nor simply assume that whatever form social agency and collective intentionality takes, it will fit neatly onto the model of agency and intentionality they employ in the standard theory of creativity. Treating political creativity as just a kind of gigantic, collective form of Beethoven’s creativity ought not to be taken seriously.

13 One might object at this stage that just because the standard model of creativity cannot be applied to political creativity, we do not thereby have evidence that there is no such thing as political creativity. And yet, I am concluding this essay with an expression of skepticism about political creativity. So, what gives? I remind the reader that these were our options: (i) posit the existence of agency, intentionality, and imaginativeness at the political level thereby clearing the way for political creativity, at least on the standard model of creativity; (ii) radically alter the standard model of creativity so that it can be applied to the political; or (iii) reserve judgment about whether the concept of political creativity successfully refers or is even coherent. (One might also object to my characterization of the political, but that comes at the cost of failing to carve out a meaningful form of human activity that is the political, and instead simply transforms “political” into an adjective that applies to specific forms of activity: political writing, political sculpture, political philosophy, etc.) The central argument of the second half of this essay targeted (i). I treated option (ii) as a non-starter. So, I landed on (iii). So, why not option (ii)? The standard model of creativity gives conditions of application for the predicate “is an instance of creativity.” These conditions have been usefully employed across a number of fields. As such, there is a great deal going for the standard model of creativity, even if specialists disagree about both marginal and central but highly specific features of the model. Given the many intellectual virtues of that model, it seems an intellectual lark to abandon it on the basis of the rhetorical aesthetics of the term ‘political creativity.’ My objector’s responsibility, then,

Political creativity  385 is to identify an instance of political creativity that demands an analysis that the standard model cannot provide. Such an instance is not yielded by the grammaticality of the phrase “political creativity” any more than the grammaticality of the phrase “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is evidence that colorless green ideas sleep furiously. What is required to motivate option (ii) as against option (iii) is richer evidence of the existence of political creativity. But, such cases must themselves be scrutinized. This essay outlines the form such scrutiny would take. What we found was that we lack a good understanding of supposed cases of political creativity. Collective agency remains mysterious. This mystery is sufficient to make appeals to supposed instances of political creativity theoretically impotent, at least when it comes to judging the adequacy of a general theory of creativity. What accounts for the attractiveness of apparent counterexamples to my conclusion is deep confusion whose resolution resolves the cases into evidence in favor of this essay’s thesis. In some cases, objectors wrongly treat as political creativity cases in which an individual imagines a political system or institution (e.g., Althusius constructing his baroque model of governance). These are cases of intellectual creativity. In other cases, objectors fail to appreciate that the body politic is a metaphor, or that reference to some institution (e.g., the state, the government, the European Court of Justice, etc.) as an agent is also strictly metaphorical. In these cases, the objector is guilty of illicit hypostasization when she claims that novel and valuable consequences of the political are instances of creativity. I therefore leave it to the reader to summon a respectable case of political creativity that is neither individualistic nor grounded in a confused appeal to a familiar metaphor. As a warning, the objector must appreciate that this strategy probably requires resolving profound mysteries of social ontology and collective intentionality. The complexity of these puzzles blocks facile gestures toward some institution as grounds to reject (iii) in favor of (ii). On the other hand, nothing I’ve written impeaches the value of the literature on individual creativity or creativity at the small-group level. Rather, it merely suggests that that it is not sufficiently general to be applicable to all areas of human activity. In particular, our philosophical understanding of creativity does not apply to socially realized institutions that aim at a certain kind of systemic governance of populations by norms produced by those institutions.23

Notes 1 However, some argue that creativity is a disposition. See Grant (2012). 2 This would explain why the philosophical literature reveals such interest in the psychology and neuroscience of creativity as opposed to interest in the social science of creativity.

386  Matthew Noah Smith 3 By ‘intellectual’ here, I am referring to processes that are non-automatic and at the conscious-level. For more on dual-process theory, see Kahneman (2003). 4 See the essays on Eisenstein and montage in Donald, Friedberg, and Marcus, eds. (1998). 5 Intellectual activity can be irrational just as much as it can be rational. Thus, even if Plato was correct in holding that creativity had to be realized in some sort of state of unreason, that state of unreason is not an unconscious or trancelike state. Instead, the idea was that there was some connection between rationally unbound reflection and creativity. But, that rationally unbound reflection remains intellectual in character, in the sense that it involves a kind of thoughtful, albeit wild, engagement with the norms of the practice. 6 Cf. Kant’s comment on this connection in Kant ([1790] 1987: 185). 7 On the other hand, if one’s novel creative process, however valuable and surprising it is, is not itself intentionally produced as a result of an exercise of some intellectual faculty, then it is not itself creative, but is instead a lucky psychological quirk. So, where there is creativity, there is an output of a creative process that itself is aptly described as creative. 8 On ideology, see Eagleton (1991). For a nice characterization of ideology in contemporary political life (but not contemporary political theory), see Rorty (1989: 191). 9 Although it might be the case that how friendship manifests itself is politically sensitive and so it has structural features (in the sense that I am using the term ‘structure’). 10 For a detailed and specific exploration of the interaction between the state and the economy, see Beckert (2014). 11 For the extreme version of this, see Simmons (1991). For the most ‘moralized’ – i.e., the most abstract and ahistorical – version of this, see Estlund (2008). Estlund recognizes that this version of his account of the political may be theoretical suspect on these grounds. See Estlund (2014) for a response to such worries. 12 Again, see Beckert (2014). 13 This suggests that some of what Appiah (2008) discusses are not instances of ethics understood as morality but instead ethics understood as the political. 14 I am influenced here by the characterization of human rights found in Moyn (2010). I am also influenced by the discussions of dignity (and its relationship to human rights) found in Rosen (2012) and Waldron (2012). 15 Following Rawls (1999), we might distinguish the concept of human rights from a conception of human rights, where the latter is a specific list of rights and a further characterization of their normative and institutional statuses, as well as their justificatory grounds. By ‘the concept of human rights’ here, then, I am referring to both the concept and various conceptions of human rights. 16 Should this philosopher’s work end up shaping the practice, then the philosopher’s work would be part of the political. But, on its own, it is not a part of the political. 17 In this way, it is just like the output of creative activity, which is always highly contingent. 18 For an exploration of this phenomena as it relates to the law understood as a social practice, see Smith (2006). 19 It is important to distinguish socially constituted enabling conditions and social constitution itself. An enabling condition for thinking about baseball is the socially constituted game of baseball. But, thinking about baseball itself is not a social activity (although this claim itself depends upon one’s view about externalism about mental content – for the canonical statements see Kripke [1972] and Putnam [1975]). 20 The J-ing that concerns us happens in the actual world and not some merely possible world. These reflections on Bratman’s work have in turn been discussed by – and largely endorsed by – Bratman in his Bratman (2013). Due to lack of space, I cannot go into why these points apply mutatis mutandis to characterizations of shared activity in Gilbert (1989), Gilbert (1996), and Tuomela (2013), but I am confident that they do. 21 So, this is just another way to put the old Fregean point that within de dicto contexts, there cannot be substitution salva veritate by merely co-referring terms. 22 There are complications here that come from the fact that this example is a case of game-playing and so there are rules governing the activity that are independent of the intentions of the players. So, an alternative would be cooking together. If I think we are cleaning up and you think we are cooking, and

Political creativity  387 I have exotic beliefs about what it is to clean up (e.g., I think you should chop vegetables in order to maximize biodegradation efficiency), then we could easily have extensional equivalence with intensional incoherence. 23 This essay benefited from comments from this volume’s editors, Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran. I am very grateful.

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Index

affective dimension 43–4, 50–1, 52: affective perspectives 163–5; affective processes 161; affective states 13, 44, 51, 157; see also negative affective experience agency: creativity and 12, 13–14, 129–33, 137, 197, 199–207, 370, 371; group agency 18, 378–85 analogical reasoning 306–9 analysis 16, 28, 177, 273–5, 278, 288–90; see also Boden, Margaret; Cantor, Georg; Frege, Gottlob; Russell, Bertrand; Zeno’s paradox Aristotle 9, 32, 40n13, 51, 110, 116, 284, 292, 314, 360 arrogance 79 artificial intelligence (AI) 17–18 artistic creativity 369; depression and 152–4; excellence theory and 338–41; merit and 17, 333–44; music composition 142–3, 145–9; negative affective experience 153–60; properties of 334–6 axioms 17, 28–9, 183, 288, 320, 323, 325, 328–9 belief 50, 62–3, 64–71, 198, 382–3; moral beliefs 358; self-belief 77–8, 86 Big-C versus little-c creativity 8–9 biology 13, 173–90; identification of novelty and 177–9; novelty and 174–7; precursors and predecessors and 178–9; self-organization and 184–90; value and 179–81 bipolar disorder 152, 156 blind-variation and selective-retention (BVSR) 196, 220–1 Boden, Margaret 3, 4–5, 13, 16, 18, 39n2, 60, 111–12, 125, 194; three-part definition of creativity 96, 196–7, 231–3, 286–9; see also historical creativity; psychological creativity bottlenecks 234–6, 257, 263, 359 Byrne, David 15, 230–7, 240–2, 247

capacity: creativity and 18, 60, 131–2, 370–1, 373, 380–1; disposition or 124–5; evaluative 143, 197; as faculty for learning 319; imagination and 9–10, 28–9, 47, 365; intellectual 35 climate change 15, 64, 183, 256–7, 354, 362–3; technological innovation and 259–60, 263 cognitive ability 52–4, 136, 251, 253 cognitive niche construction 15, 241–2 cognitive processes 6, 14, 43–4, 46–8, 143, 213, 216, 222–5, 230, 244, 251, 300, 373 cognitive products 36 cognitive science 60, 213, 223, 236 cognitive theory 236–7 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 140–1, 155, 177 collaboration 84–7 collective intentionality 381–5 combinational creativity 4–5, 16, 181–3, 196, 286–7 conceptual creativity 16, 275, 288–90; Bertrand Russell and 281–3, 289; Boden’s three kinds of creativity as 286–8, 289; Cantor’s transfinite numbers as 275–8, 288–9; Frege’s concepts as 278–81; Kant’s Copernican revolution as 283–6, 289–90; Zeno’s paradox and 277–8 contrastive stress 303–6 courage 17–18, 87–8, 124, 133, 341; creative courage 75, 88; Crow courage 350, 353, 364; intellectual courage 42 creativity, definition of 2–4, 95–6, 105–6, 124–5, 128–9, 137, 193–4, 213, 369–71 creativity, explanation of 14–15; outside-toinside logic 15, 231, 233, 235 creativity, types of 4–5, 181; combinational 4–5, 181–2, 196, 286–7; exploratory 5, 182–3, 196, 286, 287–8; transformational 5, 183, 196–7, 286, 288 cultivating creativity 37, 53–5, 74–5, 90, 175–6, 322–3, 326–8; see also teaching

Cantor, Georg 16, 294; theory of transfinite numbers 275–8, 280, 287–8

Darwin, Charles 177, 183–4, 213; see also Darwinian model of creativity; evolution

392 Index Darwinian model of creativity 14, 220–3, 233–5 deflationism 336–7, 341–3 depression 152–9, 164–5 depressive realism 157–8 development, creative 82, 84, 86–8, 90, 97–8, 100–6,175–6, 180 disposition, role in creativity 7, 50–1, 66, 83, 95–6, 124–8, 131–3 embedded mind 15, 230–1, 237, 239–42 embodied mind 15, 230–1, 236–9 empathy 355, 365 Eno, Brian 7, 244–6 environmental change see climate change epistemology 10, 60, 113, 204–7, 298; creative value and 64–6; epistemic goods 42, 48–50; epistemic value 62–6, 68, 69; failure and 69–70; injustice and 70–2; virtue epistemology 42–3, 66–9 ethics 6, 18, 34, 63, 350–1, 353–8, 364–5; broken world and 359–60; see also Aristotle; morality Euclid 28, 99, 183, 287–9, 314, 323, 325 evaluation 100–1, 143, 197, 201, 207, 244–7, 295, 308–10, 337, 355 evil 63–5, 97, 98, 114–17, 127–9, 340 evolution 13, 137, 173–4, 176, 180; language and 233–5 excellence theory 338–41, 342–3, 344 exploratory creativity 5, 16, 182–3, 196, 286, 286–7 extended mind 15, 230–1, 243–7 failure 69–70, 98–9, 117–18, 336 fantasy 140–4 fertility 95, 105–6 Frege, Gottlob 98–9, 329; concepts, conception of 16, 278–82, 287, 290 Freud 6, 177, 317 Galileo 110, 317; Galileo’s paradox 276–8 Gettier 62–3 goals 8, 30–1, 61, 89, 90, 195–6, 293, 215; luck and 7–8; shared 381–4 Gödel 294, 317 group agency 18, 378–84 Guilford’s alternative uses test 2 harmful creativity 12, 97, 98, 114–17, 124, 127–9 heuristics 16, 196, 223–4, 239, 310; constraints of 298–9; for philosophical creativity 292–8; ‘taxonomise and colonise’ 299–303

historical creativity (H-creativity) 125, 174, 176–7, 180–1, 184–5, 214, 350–1, 353 Hume, David 34–5, 89–90, 141–2, 355, 360; influence on Kant’s Copernican revolution 284–5 ignorance principle 134–6, 221 imagery 2, 6, 179, 182, 224, 246 imagination 5–6, 9–10, 27–30, 35–7, 38–9, 45, 95, 105, 140–4, 273–4, 335–6, 373; definition of 28–30; deflationism and 336–7, 341–3; foresight and 30; insight and 30; moral imagination 32–3, 351–8, 362–5; nurturing of 31–2; reconstructive imagination 28 imitation 25–6; Kant and 102, 319 immigration 260 impostor syndrome 71–2 imprudence 11, 76; creative 87–9 individual creativity (I-creativity) 13, 174–7, 180–1, 184–5, 189–90 injustice 10, 30, 36, 70–2, 165 insight 30, 45–8, 52–3, 55, 143, 153, 156, 214–15, 219, 223–4 instrumental inventiveness 30–1 instrumental value 11–12, 17, 32, 34, 37–8, 117–18, 124, 126, 129, 133 intellectual virtue 10, 32, 35–6, 42–3, 55, 322–3, 372–3; affective 43–4, 50–1; judgement 44, 52–4; motivation 43, 48–50, 95–6; skill 43, 45–8, 338–41 intentionality: collective 18, 381–5; of creativity 371–2, 378 intuition 29, 48, 61–2; “intuition pumps” 305 inventiveness 27–8, 30, 38, 45; instrumental inventiveness 30–1; intrinsic inventiveness 30–1 judgement 10, 17, 44, 52–4, 71, 74, 80, 103–4, 193, 194, 197, 201, 203, 205–7, 342 justificatory practice 200–1; see also linguistic practice; modal argument Kant, Immanuel 6, 8–9, 32, 129, 216, 292; Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ 16, 283–6, 289–90; Kant on mathematics 318–23; see also “original nonsense” knowledge 70–2; 131–2; loss of 252–6; see also epistemology Kuhn 9 learning 38, 49, 53–5, 175–6, 214, 217, 322–3, 326–8; “deep learning” 190; imitation and 251, 319; language and 234

Index  393 liar paradox 278, 294, 307–8 linguistic practice 201–2 logic 15–16, 29, 53 luck 7–8, 66, 69, 71–2, 130, 132 mathematics: Cantor’s transfinite numbers 275–8; creativity and 15–17, 313, 323–9; geometry 317–18; Heinrich’s mathematical model 252, 262; historical views on 313–18; ineffability and 315–16, 320–1; influence of Frege on 98–9, 278–81; irrational number 314–16; Kant on 318–23; quantum theory 317; see also Euclid merit: artistic 17, 333–7; merited praise 98; see also deflationism; excellence theory modal argument 203–4 moral creativity, historical examples of 350–1, 353 moral imagination 32–33, 35–8 moral imaginativeness 350–62; technological futures and 360–2; types of 362–3 moral value 62–5, 356, 363 morality 9, 17–18, 25, 32–3, 63, 64–5, 306–7, 350– 65, 374–5; ethics and 355–60; see also virtue Morrissey 86 motivation 7, 32, 43, 48–50, 60–1, 68, 95–6; vanity and 76–7, 80, 83, 85, 87 music composition 142–3, 145–9, 230, 232, 241, 244, 323

output 3–4, 27, 48, 132, 198–9, 293, 310, 369–74 perception 6, 10, 45, 47, 53, 161, 164, 175, 224, 339–41 personal perspective 160–6; negativity and 164–5 Plato 1, 6, 52, 140–1, 144–50, 216, 221, 284, 308, 314, 329 pleasure 33–4, 37, 43–4, 50–1, 355, 361, 363 political creativity 18, 354, 369, 374–6, 384–5; concepts of 375–8; group agency and 378–84 population changes 15, 234, 257–9, 260–1, 263 precursors and predecessors 178–9 predictability 26, 177; unpredictability 175–6, 220, 244, 317 priority 111–14 process concept, creativity as 193–9, 207, 370 productivity 25, 27, 44, 46–7, 101, 153, 159, 323, 370 psychological creativity (P-creativity) 111, 125, 134, 174, 214, 231; see also heuristics Pythagoras 314 quality of creativity 27, 33, 36, 53, 72, 101–2, 119, 252, 306–7, 338–9 reliability 66–9, 101, 198 rewarding, creativity as 10, 37, 38, 45, 61, 82 Russell, Bertrand 16, 98–9, 278, 281–3, 287–90, 294

narcissism 74–7, 79, 82; see also vanity naturalism 14, 218; naturalistic explanations of creativity 217–20; naturalistic point of view 14, 213; see also Darwinian model of creativity; ordinary cognitive process 223–5 Neanderthals 253–6, 258, 260 negative affective experience 153–8, 166; value of 158–60 Newton 26, 112, 317, 319–21 niche products 231–5 Nietzsche, Friedrich 142–3, 317 novelty 3, 26–8, 64, 68; kinds of 108–14; values of 119–20; see also originality nurturing creativity 31–2

self-organization 13, 173, 175, 184–90 skill 43–8, 61, 70–2, 118, 131, 143, 224, 251–2, 338, 372; skill dimension 45–8, 52 social contact 351, 374 Socrates 62–3, 175–6 spontaneity 44, 53, 98, 124, 175, 186–7, 189–90, 285–6; creativity as 133–7, 196, 213–5, 217, 219–20, 293 Stone Age 15, 252–4; Middle Stone Age 15, 252–4, 256, 262 suffering 12–13, 142–3, 152–3, 158, 160–6; see also depression; negative affective experience “swamping problem” 67–8, 70

obscurant and exceptionalist tradition 216–7 ordinary cognitive process 223–5 “original nonsense” 3, 11, 61, 95, 102–5 originality 3, 44–5, 60–2, 66–9, 95, 102–5, 108–14, 119–21, 125, 194–5, 213–17, 220, 222, 371; and biology 174–9; historical versus psychological originality 352–3; identification of 177–9; radical originality 287

Tasmania 15, 251–2, 254, 256–7, 261 teaching 31, 39, 46, 53–5, 175–6, 274, 322–3 technological innovation 251, 264; bottlenecks and 257; effect on climate change 259–60, 262–4; Neanderthals and technology 254–6; population density as driver of 260–1; Stone Age technologies 252–4, 262–4; Tasmanians and technology 251–2

394 Index terrorism and torture 12, 97, 98, 100, 114–17, 124, 127–9, 356 Torrance tests of creative thinking 2 trade 15, 261–2 transformational creativity 5, 16, 181, 183, 187, 196–7, 286, 287–8 trust 84–5, 87 truth-value theories 296–8, 300–3 unconscious, the 6, 17, 326–7 value, role in creativity 1–2, 4, 11–13, 26–9, 33–4, 37, 45, 60–2, 64–6, 95–6, 102–5, 119–21, 124, 125, 158–60, 179–81, 333, 371; absence of value 96–100; conditional value 127–9;

epistemic value 62–3; final value 126–7, 136–7; instrumental value 126, 135–6; intrinsic value 33, 126; value-neutral conceptions of creativity 108 vanity 10–11, 74–8, 89–90; benefits of 82–3; collaboration and 85–7; creative imprudence and 87–9; nature of 78–82; virtue theoretical approach to 75–6, 83–4 virtual reality 17–18, 363 virtue 6–7, 9–11, 25, 35–7, 66–9, 74–5, 90, 333; creativity as human good 37–8; mixed virtues 35–7; see also intellectual virtue; vanity Zeno’s paradox 277–8