ABSTRACT
The heart of the matter is the actual act of production. This is the basic type of creative phenomena discussed in the Prologue. This is the act when an artificer, in response to a desire or goal brings into existence an artifact intended to satisfy the goal. When people generally ask, “What goes on in creativity?” it is this act of production they usually have in mind. It is what justifies all the proactive and reactive preparation that the artificer engages in.
The real problem in trying to make sense of the act of production is the dilemma of the unconscious (Chapter 7). We are, thus, severely limited in how specific, how precise, how definite we can be in uncovering a particular act of production. We have to rely heavily in the archival or historical data to circumvent this limitation.
But there is a “Darwinian ghost” in this discourse. This “ghost” insists that the act of production is in some real sense—not metaphorically—a Darwinian process; that it entails an essential blind (meaning statistically random) component that generates possible cognitive choices as variations from which a selection is made. We call this cognitive Darwinism.
After outlining the history of this theory, beginning with psychologist Donald Campbell, supported by philosopher of science Karl Popper and others, and culminating, most vigorously in the writings of psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, its strongest current advocate, I present several cognitive historical case studies of 20th century industrial designer Phillipe Stacke, poet Stephen Spender, and artists Pablo Picasso and George Rodrigue, and 19th century engineer Robert Stephenson to refute cognitive Darwinism as a theory of the act of production. I argue that the act of production may well be evolutionary but it is purposive evolution.
But there are other remarkable cognitive operations that are present in the act of production which we discuss in this chapter. They include, in particular, writer Arthur Koestler’s notion of “bisociation,” literary scholar Mark Turner’s notion of “conceptual blending,” psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg’s notion of “janusian process” and our own proposal that the act of production may entail inventing and/or instantiating schemas, or shifting between schemas. We draw extensively on case studies taken from the creative tradition to explore the nature of these cognitive operations, including the invention of stone tools in the Paleolithic age.
