Is the ability to produce ideas that are both novel and valuable?

Julia Langkau is an Assistant Professor at the University of Geneva. She is working on a project titled “Creativity, Imagination and Tradition” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She also writes literary fiction.

A post by Julia Langkau

What is creativity? Margaret Boden (1994/2004) has suggested it is the ability of a subject to produce an idea or artifact that is valuable, new and surprising. Similarly, Sternberg and Lubart (1999, 3) think that ‘creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful, adaptive concerning task constraints)’. Boden further makes the tacit assumption that the idea or artifact ‘was freely generated by the person concerned’ (Boden 2014, 233). Besides talking about a ‘creative’ subject, we can thus also call the required mental process ‘creative’, and we can speak of a ‘creative idea’ or a ‘creative artifact’.

The value component in the definition of creativity allows us to distinguish creative ideas or artifacts from what Kant called ‘original nonsense’ (Kant 2000, 186), which is an idea or artifact that is new and surprising, but lacks any value. Alison Hills and Alexander Bird (2018, 2019) have argued for a wider notion of creativity which does not require that the idea or artifact be valuable. Hills and Bird’s argument goes roughly as follows. When we look at certain ideas or artifacts that are the result of what looks like a creative process, some of them are valuable and others are not. Following the idea that creativity involves value, we judge that only the ones that are valuable are creative. However, the mental process involved in generating both kinds of ideas or artifacts must have been more or less the same, and it would be unreasonable to judge creativity on the basis of the product only. ‘It is therefore not appropriate to give different explanations of how each [idea or artifact] was produced—both are explained by the use of [the] imagination.’ (Hills and Bird 2018, 101) Hence, creativity cannot involve value. The authors conclude: ‘Rather than value, we propose that the imagination is essential to creativity: creativity is the disposition to use the imagination in the fertile production of ideas along with the motivation to bring those ideas to fruition.’ (Hills and Bird 2018, 105-106)

Creativity is thus a disposition of a subject to repeatedly imagine novel ideas and to produce certain outputs on the basis of these ideas. Just like Boden’s, Hills and Bird’s definition aims to comprise both the mental process of creating and the creative product by ascribing creativity primarily to a subject. Hills and Bird (2019, 1) state explicitly: ‘We focus here on the definition of creativity as a trait of persons’.

While Hills and Bird think that more emphasis should be put on the process of creating (whether the result is valuable or not), I agree that the product is indeed only part of what we care about when it comes to creativity. In my forthcoming paper “Two Notions of Creativity”, I argue that we should distinguish creativity as we ascribe it to products from creativity as we ascribe it to processes. Value, however, is a core part of creativity, both of the product and of the process.

By keeping product creativity and process creativity apart, we can approve of the creativity of a process without calling the product valuable. For instance, even though a child’s drawing is not new or objectively valuable, it may still have been brought about through a creative process. In a derived sense, we can call the child’s drawing creative, because the process was creative. In fact, I think creative imagining doesn’t need a new product at all, and there can be creativity without any product. For instance, I think that reading literary fiction engages our imagination creatively. And maybe sometimes looking out of the window does. Of course, how exactly this is the case depends on what creative imagination is (see Arcangeli forthcoming for discussion of creative imagination).

Further, there can be product creativity without a creative process. Hills and Bird note that ‘not all ways of producing novel, valuable ideas are creative. For instance, it may be possible to produce such ideas by a random process; or by a purely mechanical process, such as following a simple rule. But these are not typically exercises of creativity’ (Hills and Bird 2019, 2). While the processes are not exercises of creativity, the products can still be new, surprising and valuable and hence creative in Boden’s sense. For instance, art generated by AI processes can be new, surprising and valuable, even if computer programs cannot engage in creative processes.

I am thus suggesting that we ascribe creativity either to a product or to a process, and only in a derived sense to a subject. My suspicion is that the focus on the disposition or ability of a subject comes from the fact that psychology is so far ahead of philosophy concerning research on creativity. Psychologists look mostly at the output of a subject to ascribe creativity, and philosophers have just gone along with them. But as philosophers, we can at least partly rely on introspection, and hence when investigating the nature of creativity, we should be interested in the mental process on the one hand, and in the conditions under which we call a certain product ‘creative’ on the other hand.

Not only can we solve various intuitive tensions (for instance concerning AI creativity), there’s also independent evidence for the idea that we are dealing with two different notions of creativity: different cultures have different practices of ascribing creativity; some emphasize the mental process, others the valuable product (Paletz, Peng, and Li 2011). In their study published in a paper titled ‘In the World or in the Head: External and Internal Implicit Theories of Creativity’ (2011), Susannah Paletz, Kaiping Peng, and Siyu Li investigate the concept of creativity in different cultures, mainly in East Asian and Caucasian North American individuals.

Contrary to previous studies in which, drawing from anthropological, philosophical, and psychological literature, it was suggested that the Eastern notion of creativity emphasizes ‘inner processes and fulfilment’, while the Western notion of creativity emphasizes creative products (Lubart 1999), they predicted that East Asians are significantly more likely to emphasize external factors in creativity, and North Americans are more likely to emphasize internal factors (Paletz, Peng, and Li 2011, 86). To a subject with their main focus on internal aspects, ‘creativity is more likely to be considered to encompass creative activities such as reflection, states of being and inner experience, intuition, thinking, and high levels of self-awareness’. A person who is more aware of situational aspects, ‘might focus on more external dimensions in his or her conception of creativity’ (Paletz, Peng, and Li 2011, 85). Such expressions of creativity would be, amongst other things, visible products. The authors were able to confirm their hypotheses, but they note that this doesn’t mean that North Americans ‘disdain accomplishments and external evidence for creativity’, or that East Asians ‘see all internally-focused activities as noncreative’ (Paletz, Peng, and Li 2011, 98).

Both kinds of creativity, I think, involve value, but in different ways. The creative process very likely comes with intrinsic value, which explains why creative activities such as knitting, writing, playing music or painting are cherished, recommended and taught. It also explains why we value non-valuable products such as our children’s (often bad) drawings: we value them as manifestations or expressions of a valuable creative process. In the context of a new and surprising product, whether it involves value and can thus be called ‘creative’ depends on various external factors such as our culture, our education, our taste, our needs and interests, etc. The distinction between valuable, i.e., creative products and products that are ‘original nonsense’ helps us explain why we value the works of artists and scientists most: in these cases, process creativity and product creativity occur together.

Once we have taken creative process and creative product apart, we can rethink the notion of the creative subject. Maybe a creative subject is not one that generates many products, but simply one that has a certain imaginative outlook on the world. Or one that imagines more than others, or reads more literary fiction (listens to music, engages with paintings, etc.).

References

Arcangeli, M. (forthcoming). The creative side of recreative imagination. In Engisch, P. and Langkau, J. (eds.), The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition. Routledge.

Boden, M. A. (1994/2004). The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. New York: Routledge.

Boden, M A. (2010). Creativity and Art. Three Roads to Surprise, Oxford University Press.

Hills, A. and Bird, A. (2019). Against Creativity. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99: 3, 694–713.

Kant, Immanuel (2000), Critique of the Power of Judgment (edited by Paul Guyer, transl. by P. Guyer, and E. Matthews), Cambridge University Press, 2000 (1790).

Langkau J. (forthcoming), Two Notions of Creativity

Paletz, S.B.F., Peng, K. and Li, S. (2011). In the world or in the head: external and internal implicit theories of creativity, Creativity Research Journal 23(2): 83–98.

Sternberg, R. J., and Lubart, T. I. (1999). The concept of creativity: prospects and paradigms. In Sternberg, R. J. (ed.), Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–15.

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