Probing the Mind Behind the (Literal and Figurative) Lightbulb

TL;DR

This paper critiques the biological and theoretical foundations of BVSR in creativity research, arguing it lacks a scientific framework and clarifies misconceptions about creative processes and usefulness.

Contribution

It offers a critical analysis of BVSR's limitations and clarifies misconceptions about creativity, emphasizing the importance of a scientific framework and context-dependent usefulness.

Findings

BVSR lacks a scientific framework for hypothesis generation.

Creativity involves internal conception, not just external output.

Usefulness of ideas is context-dependent and not zero-sum.

Abstract

After doing away with the evolutionary scaffold for BVSR, what remains is a notion of "blindness" that does not distinguish BVSR from other theories of creativity, and an assumption that creativity can be understood by treating ideas as discrete, countable entities, as opposed to different external manifestations of a singular gradually solidifying internal conception. Uprooted from Darwinian theory, BVSR lacks a scientific framework that can be called upon to generate hypotheses and test them. In lieu of such a framework, hypotheses appear to be generated on the basis of previous data--they are not theory-driven. The paper does not explain how the hypothesis that creativity is enhanced by engagement in a "network of enterprises" is derived from BVSR; this hypothesis is more compatible with competing conceptions of creativity. The notion that creativity involves backtracking conflates evidence for backtracking with respect to the external output with evidence for backtracking of the conception of the invention. The first does not imply the second; a creator can set aside a creative output but cannot go back to the conception of the task he/she had prior to generating that output. The notion that creativity entails superfluity (i.e., many ideas have "zero usefulness") is misguided; usefulness is context-dependent, moreover, the usefulness of an idea may reside in its being a critical stepping-stone to a subsequent idea.