ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with personal creativity before turning to consensual creativity. It defines three parameters and then shows how these yield the fully adequate definition of personal creativity. Now some psychologists would argue that creativity, even creative genius, is just a guise of supreme domain-specific expertise. Creativity researchers have a tendency to conflate two distinct levels of analysis: the personal and the consensual. The personal level concerns what is actually happening inside an individual's head, and thus is purely psychological. Personal creativity can certainly take place at the purely psychological level. It happens every time an animal or human engages in creative problem solving. Like personal creativity, personal expertise operates solely at the individual level and requires no comparisons or assessments involving other individuals, expert or otherwise. The necessity of prior expertise before combinatorial creativity can even begin becomes more evident when researchers can control the experience acquired before entering the situation.
