The Notion of Creativity Revisited: A Philosophical Perspective on Creativity Research

This article is a critical, yet constructive, review of some recent attempts to define and understand creativity, informed by the methods and debates of contemporary philosophy. I argue that the definitional project is not essential to creativity research, but important nevertheless. The standard definition of creativity as the production of something that is both novel and appropriate is on the right track, but needs further qualification and tends to be elaborated in ways that make it either too narrow or too broad. I argue that the product, and not the person or process, should be viewed as the primary bearer of creativity and criticize some influential theorists for making creativity too strongly dependent on social acceptance, while also recognizing that the realist alternative tends to widen, and thus threatens to trivialize, the central notion of an appropriate product. The notion of response-dependence might be of some help to find the proper balance between the two extremes, and some comparisons with evolutionary theory also help to shed further light on the problem. Finally, I try to spell out the practical consequences of my investigation for creativity research.