ABSTRACT

In using reconstruction/redirection, an individual suggests that the field should move backward to a previous point but then should move in a direction divergent from where it has moved. In other words, the individual suggests that at some time in the past, the field went off track. The individual suggests the point at which this occurred and how the field should have moved forward from that point. The work is judged as creative to the extent that the individual is judged as correctly recognizing that the field has gone off track and to the extent that the new direction suggested from the past is viewed as a useful direction for the field to pursue. Of course, sometimes people who use this strategy are simply reintroducing ideas that have been shown to be lacking or simply dead wrong, hoping that their reintroduction of these ideas will somehow make what did not work in the past, work in the present. In such cases, the proposals amount to taking bad wine and trying to sell it in a newer and hopefully classier bottle. Consider examples of reconstruction/redirection in science and technology.