A Cognitive-Historical Approach to Creativity

Subrata Dasgupta

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429628009
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psicologia
• Categoría: Storia e teoria della psicologia

At the heart of creativity is the practice of bringing something new into existence, whether it be a material object or abstract idea, thereby making history and enriching the creative tradition. A Cognitive Historical Approach to Creativity explores the idea that creativity is both a cognitive phenomenon and a historical process. Blending insights and theories of cognitive science with the skills, mentality and investigative tools of the historian, this book considers diverse issues including: the role of the unconscious in creativity, the creative process, creating history with a new object or idea, and the relationship between creators and consumers. Drawing on a plethora of real-life examples from the eighteenth century through to the present day, and from distinct fields including the arts, literature, science and engineering, Subrata Dasgupta emphasizes historicity as a fundamental feature of creativity.

Providing a unified, integrative, interdisciplinary treatment of cognitive history and its application to understanding and explaining creativity in its multiple domains, A Cognitive Historical Approach to Creativity is essential reading for all researchers of creativity.

1

THE COGNITIVE–HISTORICAL SPACE

I What is cognition?

If we wish to make sense of creative phenomena of the kind mentioned in the Prologue we need some sort of broad background within which we can both frame and understand such phenomena. For our purposes I will call this the cognitive–historical space.

But what is cognition? Some writers answer by simply giving examples of what they think are its instances. For example, cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn (1984) introduced his book Computation and Cognition by identifying a “vocabulary” of cognitive terms: perception, recognition, classification of experiences, inferencing, decision making, remembering and knowledge processing (p. 15).

But what connects these terms and concepts? What is common to them that we may call them instances of cognition? Some writers have offered working definitions. For example, for neuropsychologist Richard Gregory (1987) cognition is the means for “handling knowledge” (p. 149). So knowledge is at the center of this view of cognition, a view that psychologist Howard Gardner (1985) concurred with. And so, by extension, the discipline of cognitive science is concerned with the origins, nature, development, and uses of knowledge (p. 6). In her textbook on cognition Margaret Matlin (2009) reiterates this centrality of knowledge (p. 2).

Most writers, of course, equate cognition with mental activity. Thus mind and cognition become one; for the knowledge-centered advocates the mind is a knowledge processor. But is knowledge processing all that there is to cognition? Is this what is common to the various cognitive terms mentioned by Pylyshyn? And if so, what is the nature of this knowledge processing that Howard Gardner called “cognitive science?”

We find one explicit answer to these questions in cognitive scientist and philosopher Margaret Boden’s (2006) two-volume, 1500-page history of cognitive science titled, significantly, Mind as Machine. Cognitive science, she tells us, is concerned with mental processes and the workings of the mind/brain system (p. xxxv). But then she adds that such mental processes are best perceived as the workings of a machine (ibid.). Yet, she cautions, there is more to cognitive science than just cognition. She refers to psychologist George Miller, one of the founders of cognitive science, and his colleagues, notably Jerome Bruner, who included volition, conation (that is, motivation) and emotion within the scope of cognitive science (Boden 2006, p. 10).

Unfortunately, this eclecticism did not last: As Boden explained, because of the inconvenience of such matters as motivation and emotion as subjects of empirical study, they were soon put aside (p. 11).

When Boden spoke of cognitive science as the study of the mind as a “machine” she was, of course, referring to the computer: she recognized cognitive science as the interdisciplinary science of mind wherein the central theoretical concepts were founded in computer science (p. 12).

Just how or why the computer entered the picture has its own history reaching back to the 1940s and the work and ideas of some remarkable scientists such as psychologist Kenneth Craik, mathematician/computer theorist Alan Turing, neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, mathematical logician Walter Pitts and mathematician/computer theorist John von Neumann (Craik 1943; McCulloch and Pitts 1943; Turing 1950; von Neumann 1945, 1951, 1958). By the late 1970s, when the journal Cognitive Science was inaugurated (in 1977) and the Cognitive Science Society was instituted at a conference in La Jolla, California (in 1979), computer science in the form of one of its subdisciplines, artificial intelligence (AI) was firmly in place as an influential contributory discipline of cognitive science. In defining cognitive science as the study of “mind as machine,” Boden was giving voice to just how influential this view (which we may call computationalism) is.

II Cognition as meaning-making

Not everyone in the cognitive science community accepts the computational perspective. In particular Jerome Bruner became in later life very vocal in his opposition to computationalism. In his book Acts of Meaning Bruner pointed out that the intent of the “cognitive revolution” was to bring “mind” back into psychology after its fifty-year exile (at least in America) under the insidious influence of behaviorism (Bruner 1990, p. 1). The irony, he lamented, was that this desire was soon overtaken by the influence of computationalism as the “ruling metaphor” and, indeed, ideology for achieving this end. But this was not what he and his colleagues intended the “revolution” to be: their intention had been to locate meaning as the core idea in psychology (p. 2). For Bruner, then, cognition is a meaning-making enterprise. But in order to construct such meaning, cognition is not only constituted of actions located within a being. Meaning-making also entails the active participation of culture—as an inherent constituent of mind (p. 33). Thus, Bruner believed, it was his and his collaborators’ hope that cognitive science would be the systematic study of how humans (and, possibly, other animals) make meaning out of their interactions with the world.

III Cognitive science as the science of meaning-making

Our starting point in this book is Bruner’s position. More precisely, we will take as axiomatic the following propositions.

Proposition 1: There exists an entity called mind possessed by human beings (and possibly to a lesser extent by other living forms). Let us call such beings conscious agents.

Proposition 2: The function of mind is to enable conscious agents to make meaning out of their experiences with, and in, the world at large—both the external world outside their physical extent and the internal world within their physical extent. Such meaning-making processes constitute cognition.

Proposition 3: Cognitive processes involve the participation of culture.

Proposition 4: The aim of cognitive science is to construct or propose empirically plausible models and hypotheses about such meaning-making (that is, cognitive) processes.

By “empirically plausible” we mean that the models/hypotheses of cognitive processes must meet two kinds of constraints.

The behavioral constraint: All explanatory models or hypotheses about cognition must be consistent with the observed behavior of conscious agents and how they interact with one another and with the world beyond.

The physical or biological constraint: All explanatory models or hypotheses about cognition must be consistent with the constraints imposed on the mind by the known physical and/or biological attributes of conscious agents.

The latter, of course, refers to observable or known neuronal and sensory-motor constraints.

The significance of the word “conscious” should be noted. Consciousness is, of course, a much studied and debated concept among philosophers of mind (see, e.g., Chalmers 1996), and its place (and that of its counter-concept, unconsciousness) in the study of creativity will be the subjects of a later chapter. In speaking of “conscious agent,” I use the word in the psychological sense of the agent being aware of its environment and of itself (self-aware) and whose behavior takes into account such awareness.

Computationalism is, thus, not intrinsic to these propositions. But this is not to discount the language and concepts of computer science as modes of, or as metaphors in, explanation. Notice that proposition 2, “Bruner’s proposition,” suggests what cognition is, not how it may be realized; and the “empirically plausible models” of proposition 4 leaves open the possibility for empirically plausible computational models We will have some occasion in the course of this book when computational thinking (Dasgupta 2016a, pp. 119–128) will be a fruitful tool of explanation.

IV Elements of a cognitive–historical space

This brings us back to our central concern: human creativity. Having clarified the concepts of cognition and cognitive science for our purposes we can now consider in some depth the various elements constituting our cognitive–historical space. We postulate that the individual human agents who participate in creative phenomena can be characterized in terms of the elements of the cognitive–historical space. Thus, the cognitive historian’s own understanding, analysis and explanation of a creative phenomenon will be articulated in terms of this same space. In other words we will theorize about creative phenomena in general by referring to this framework.

Community

The creative being—the artificer—is not an island of her own (despite the myth of the “lonely genius”). She belongs to a community—or society—that in different ways nourishes her. Psychologist Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi (1988) called such a social entity a “field,” rather like a field of force in physics.

For one thing, the artificer needs one or more target consumers of her artifacts. The consumer’s role is to experience the artifact, to judge it, criticize it, interpret it and, in some situations, use it. The consumer may also serve as an agent of transmission and dissemination of information about the artifact to other members of the artificer’s immediate community, or even to members of other communities, possibly across generations. This is where the teacher, the textbook writer, the synthesizer, the scholar, the critic and the “popular” expositor become important players in the making of creative phenomena.

Community is also the source of stimuli for the artificer. She may glean ideas and knowledge from other members of the community to which she belongs or perhaps from other distant societies. In other words the artificer is as much the consumer of other people’s artifacts as the producer of artifacts.

It is not for nothing that Paris became the epicenter of new movements in art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nor that Calcutta (now Kolkata) became, through the course of the nineteenth century, the locus of a creative movement called the Bengal Renaissance. Nor that the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge became an amazingly fertile place for the development of nuclear physics in the first half of the twentieth century. Nor that a part of Northern California—“Silicon Valley”—emerged as the epicenter of the development of computer and information technology in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century. In each case artificers within a community—painters in the first situation, writers, poets, social reformers, theologians, and scientists in the second, physicists in the third, and computer scientists, solid state physicists and digital engineers in the last—stimulated and “fed off” one another’s works and ideas.

Culture

The poet/playwright T.S. Eliot in his classic essay Notes on the Definition of Culture wrote of “three senses” of this term: as associated with the individual, a group (or class) or an entire society (Eliot 1962, p. 21). But, Eliot said, there is a hierarchical relationship between them: a society’s culture is the most fundamental, then that of the group or class, and then that of the individual. If I have understood him correctly, culture “flows” from society to group/class to individual. In more recent times, such scholars as the anthropologist Michael Tomasello (1999) would agree with Eliot, while others, notably psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides (1992) have opined the reverse: that culture is the product of (individual) psychology.

But what is culture? Literary scholar Raymond Williams (1963) presented four distinct interpretations of the term (p. 16): (a) The state or habit of the mind, as when we say that a person is “cultured.” (This is consonant with Matthew Arnold’s idea of culture as a person’s “inward condition of mind and spirit” (Arnold 1970, p. 209).) (b) The state of the intellectual development of a society. (c) The corpus of activity known as “art.” (d) An entire way of life.

This last seems particularly relevant to creativity. It approximates the anthropologist’s sense of the term as when Clifford Geertz (1973) described culture as “webs of significance” humans themselves have “spun” (p. 5). For the anthropologist a society’s culture comprises of whatever a person belonging to that society needs to know or believe in order to function within that society (D’Andrade 1995, p. xii). But that culture must be meaningful (“webs of significance”) to the society that subscribes to it. To follow Bruner’s thinking, culture is the public ingredient of the meaning-making process. And in turn, it is itself the product of cognition, a human creation, a gigantic artifact, a product of human collective creativity.

To my mind, a particularly useful and insightful characterization of culture is offered by anthropologist Dan Sperber (1996). He distinguished between mental representations and public representations. The former are the symbol structures that reside within individual agents; the latter inhabit populations of agents (p. 25)—communities. Public representations are (to use a term with a computational flavor), distributed representations—and such representations, when relatively stable over a long period, Sperber suggested, constitute culture (p. 57). And so, following this line, we will take culture to mean a body of public, widely-distributed, and temporally stable symbolic representations of things in the world inhabiting particular communities.

As for the relationship between mental (cognitive) and cultural representations, Sperber takes a decidedly eclectic view that straddles both camps of the cognition–culture debate mentioned above. Each is the cause and effect of the other: cognitive representations are interpretations of public representations, which in turn emanate from other individual mental representations (p. 26). Otherwise, Sperber suggests, there are no boundaries separating one from the other (p. 49).

In concrete terms, the elements of culture include (representations of) customs, traditions, mores and manners, symbol structures, shared beliefs and knowledge, values, perceptions, language, art objects, utilitarian objects and world views. While anthropologists study these phenomena in particular societies, the cultural historian traces and tracks the course of some particular cultural element (for example, the ideal of chivalry or the practice of table manners) through some historical period (Burke 2008). In any case, such cultural elements are all artifacts. And significantly, culture being an attribute of some particular community, it is a shared public entity distributed within that community. Hence we talk of many different cultures: scientific, African-American, corporate, Jewish, print, digital, academic and so on. Literary scholar and historian Edward Said (1994) noted that this sense of “culture” is “a source of identity” (p. xiii), a fact that is of importance (as we will see) in the realm of creativity.

Nature

The natural environment may, and usually does, play a vital role in most creative realms. Its presence is usually in the form of experiencing the natural world or observing its manifold forms, and its influence in initiating or executing creative phenomena. The poet’s observation of a natural phenomenon evokes the onset of a poem’s composition; the painter’s contemplation of a momen...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Prologue
• Acknowledgments
• Dramatis personae
• 1 The cognitive–historical space
• 2 Artifacts: the very “stuff ” of creativity
• 3 Artificers and consumers
• 4 A cognitive pas de deux
• 5 Knowledge schemas in creative thought
• 6 The prepared mind
• 7 “The unconscious machine”
• 8 Preparing for illumination
• 9 The actual act of production
• 10 Inventing cognitive style
• 11 The psychohistorian’s contribution
• 12 Of creative movements
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index