ABSTRACT
The long fascination of historians, psychologists, philosophers, and scientists with scientific creativity has produced a wealth of scattered insights about specific individuals and episodes. For the most part these have remained within disciplinary confines. Cognitive scientists have used many approaches to investigate scientific creativity, ranging from conducting experiments, and analyzing diaries of scientists, to computational simulations of the discovery process. These diverse approaches have resulted in many important models and theories of scientific creativity. No one would deny that conceptual innovation and change is one of the most creative and extraordinary dimensions of scientific activity. The outcomes, i.e., new representational systems for understanding the world, are customarily perceived to be the works of geniuses - the Newtons, Darwins, or Einsteins of humanity - whose mental capacities and ways of thinking lie far outside of those of ordinary mortals.
