ABSTRACT
The impact of Piaget’s work has led to an appreciation that even the fumblings of a young child can embody creative discovery-but at the individual and personal level. This distinction is captured by Boden’s term ‘psychological-creativity’ versus the ordinary, exalted sense of historical-creativity (see Chapter 3). In terms of the underlying cognitive mechanism, an organism capable of psychologicalcreativity is in principle also capable of historical-creativity: the distinction depends only on whether the personal discovery is known already to the community at large. In early childhood, there is so much to assimilate and understand that psychological-creativity becomes almost routine. Nevertheless, the requirement of personal discovery and innovation means that most of us, most of the time, do not consider that we are busy in creative thought.
