Abstract
Cognitive scientists who model creative thinking on computers claim that the ability of their programs to replicate the discovery of scientific laws (e.g., Kepler’s third law from Brahe’s data) means that creative thinking in humans is nothing but problem solving of the kind computer heuristics use. This claim is shown to be a mystification based on a misunderstanding of creativity, on unrealistic replications of the initial conditions present at the inception of creative processes, and on a misleading identification of rationality with complex human thought processes. Some of the implications of such mystification for understanding thought processes in general are reviewed.
Reprinted from New Ideas in Psychology, vol. 6, no 2, pp. 159–176, 1988. Printed in Great Britain with permission from Elsevier © 1988 Elsevier.
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Notes
- 1.
The research reported in this chapter was supported by the Spencer Foundation and by the Social Sciences Research Council Committee on Giftedness, Creativity, and the Learning Process.
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Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). Motivation and Creativity: Towards a Synthesis of Structural and Energistic Approaches to Cognition. In: Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9088-8_11
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