Creativity and Philosophy by Berys Gaut Matthew Kieran & Matthew Kieran

Author:Berys Gaut,Matthew Kieran & Matthew Kieran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

II Epistemology

The psychological question of central interest is what is involved in, or what is the structure of, competent judgements about creativity. Section I was spent motivating a conceptual process requirement for the concept CREATIVITY. Although we take our arguments to this conclusion to be novel, the conclusion itself is not. Others have argued for a process requirement of some kind. And so it will be no surprise, at least to those theorists, that creativity judgements often involve judgement that an agent has undergone a process of the right kind (where theorists can fill out ‘of the right kind’ as their theories dictate). However, there are two ways in which the analysis just given has significant implications (the second one perhaps most surprising, and accordingly the central subject matter for this concluding section).

First, it is worth noting that one can, and some do, defend a pure product view of creativity. As an intuitive matter, art appreciators spend more time at galleries enjoying creative artworks than they do on the art-history of creative processes of artists. We talk about creative breakthroughs and theories in science, perhaps more than the research activities that generate them. These intuitions comport with a formidable view in analytic aesthetics, namely, the anti-intentionalism defended foremost by Monroe Beardsley. Although more standardly taken as a theory about aesthetic value, Beardsley extends his anti-intentionalism to creativity as well. He writes, “The true locus of creativity is not the genetic process prior to the work but the work itself as it lives in the experience of the beholder” (Beardsley 1965: 302). Beardsley’s view is motivated by an independent anti-intentionalist argument. That argument has been recounted and criticized elsewhere (Stokes 2008). What our analysis provides is an independent set of arguments that push against the pure product view. At least sometimes, the “locus” of creativity is the very “genetic process” that Beardsley denies.

The second and perhaps more surprising implication of our process view is this: even when one is judging a product to be creative (for instance, one is pointing to and saying of an artwork or a bit of technology that that is creative), one is at least implicitly identifying the agency-involving process that generated that product. This conclusion will require more work to motivate.

To begin, recall the simple argument schema with which we began our discussion.

Let x = some idea or object.

i x’s being F is conceptually necessary for x’s being creative.

iiInsofar as a subject S is competently applying the concept CREATIVE: If S judges that x is creative, then S at least implicitly judges that x is F.

Section I was spent motivating the claim that novelty and value do not suffice. A third condition needed is broadly this: F = being produced in the right kind of way. And being produced in the right kind of way, we argued, is a generative process that non-trivially involves agency. Gaut’s notion of flair nicely captures the way in which a process might ­non-trivially involve agency. If Premise ii follows from Premise i, then we can infer the following.

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