Notes on Creativity

It is a curious fact that creativity is both extremely common and also very rare. Everyone has it to a marked degree, but it is not given to everyone to be markedly creative. It is both easy and difficult, effortless and effortful. How can this be? The areas in which it is commonplace, indeed universal, are primarily dreaming and language: everyone is capable of highly creative dreams, though without training or labor; and everyone learns a natural language, noted for its creative potential. Human beings are endowed with great powers of creation in these two areas, which they simply take for granted. To these might be added fantasy and humor: everyone can fantasize the wildest things, and everyone has the ability to see a joke no matter how novel. We don’t learn either of these things at school or by parental instruction; they come to us naturally, automatically. We are evidently born with the capacities in question. But in other areas where we use the word “creative” things are quite the opposite: as with musical creativity, or artistic, or scientific, or literary, or architectural, or mathematical, or culinary. Here few people are particularly creative, and it takes considerable effort to acquire these kinds of creativity; they are far from effortless and automatic. Nor do they spontaneously appear in the second year of life. But why not if creativity is a natural psychological kind? If the human brain allows for easy creativity in dreaming and language, why not in other areas? If there is a single mental faculty called “creativity”, shouldn’t it be more uniform in its manifestations? To answer this, we would need to know a lot more about creativity, but we are notoriously ignorant of the nature of creativity. I will make a stab at some elementary reflections.

            First, we may observe that neither of the two easy forms of creativity is derivative from the other. The dreaming capacity is not a special case of the language capacity and vice versa. They evolved independently and the principles that govern them are not identical. So, we know that creativity can take very different forms. Both involve the creation of novelty, to be sure, but this may come about by different mechanisms with different sorts of output (dream content or sentences). There is likewise no reason to suppose that the hard forms of creativity derive from the easy forms by some sort of transformation or metamorphosis. Let us refer to these forms as type 1 and type 2 creativity, respectively; then we can say that type 2 creativity is not the result of type 1 creativity—not without substantial enrichment anyway. Type 1 is certainly not sufficient for type 2, even though it may be necessary (you obviously can’t have literary creativity without a more basic linguistic creativity). Perhaps the brain mechanisms that underlie dreaming and language also operate in the case of the more “sophisticated” forms of creativity, but clearly there is no identity or reduction linking the two. It may also be observed that other animals seem to be distinct also-rans when it comes to creative power, though many dream and possess symbol systems; no Mozarts or Picassos there. The other striking fact is that the type 2 cases are also not transferable: you can be creative in music, say, but not in the other areas. This is surprising, given that each area shares a good number of surface features: time of emergence, similar personality characteristics, statistical distribution in the population. One would think that a genius in one area might be a genius in another, but this seldom happens. So, these types of creativity seem strongly modularized—as much as in the type 1 cases. You might begin to wonder whether the term “creativity” is too general, too homogenizing. Perhaps there are many distinct creativity modules operating according to different principles; all they share is the property of novelty (not that this is a well-defined property either). That is, creative mental acts involve what Chomsky called “stimulus-freedom”: they are not predictable from the properties of the stimulus but seem to reflect more endogenous (and obscure) activity. But beyond that they may be quite heterogeneous.

            What mental activity is not creative? The prime example is perception: here we have predictable, even mechanical, production of the percept (hence Fodor’s “encapsulation” property). The visual system does not inject creativity into the processing of the proximal stimulus, though it certainly adds to it. When you see things, your brain is not exercising its creative powers: there is no genuine stimulus-freedom. Animals perceive as we do, but we wouldn’t say they are being creative in so doing.  Nor is ordinary deductive reasoning creative: it follows strict simple rules. Computation is not creation. However, we know so little about the creative act that it is difficult to be dogmatic; we are operating at the level of hunches and intuitions. We have no science of creation, as we have a science of perception—presumably because perception is not creative. Creation is a mystery, but perception is not (in the same way at any rate). Is the body ever creative, not just the mind? Even that question is hard to answer, and not only because the division of body and mind is itself difficult to articulate. Certainly, much of the creative process is unconscious, both type 1 and type 2, so not part of the conscious mind.

            I will venture a hypothesis about the difference between type 1 and type 2 creativity in respect of their distribution. Type 2 creativity is not distributed equally in the population; there are considerable individual differences. But type 1 creativity is egalitarian and universal (save in abnormal cases). Why the difference of frequency? My hypothesis is that dreaming and language are largely innate and species-specific, so everyone has them; but the type 2 cases are not innate in this way and are not species traits. They are like athletic ability not like basic anatomy: they have to be worked at: they don’t come with the genes. No genetic mutation led to musical creativity as a species characteristic, but genetic mutations led to dream and language creativity. Mozart was born to dream and speak, like the rest of us, but he had to work at his music; it wasn’t just in there waiting to unfold. He might never have been a musical genius, but he was sure to become an expert dreamer and speaker—just like everybody else. Some types of creativity are pre-programmed and some are dependent on environmental circumstances. It’s not the inner workings of the faculty itself that makes the difference; it’s the origin of the faculty. We can conceive of musical creativity being a species-wide innately determined trait, like dreaming and language, and we can conceive that these latter two traits might be acquired later by hard work and conducive circumstances, varying a good deal from individual to individual: but given their actual origins, the former are type 2 and the latter type 1. All are bona fide cases of creativity, but their path into the human mind is different. Some come from nature while others require nurture.[1]

Colin McGinn

[1] Creativity is a topic usually avoided by psychologists and philosophers (an exception is Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation, 1964, which I read as a psychology student around 1969). Perhaps it is time to get creative about creativity.

Scientific Speech Acts

How do scientific acts of speech differ from other kinds, say political? In analyzing speech acts Austin distinguished “locutionary meaning”, “illocutionary force”, and “perlocutionary effect”: how do these categories manifest themselves in the speech of scientists? Locutionary meaning pertains to the propositional content of speech acts irrespective of the communicative intentions of the speaker (assertion, command, conditionality, warning, etc.). Here we can say that scientific speech acts typically have theoretical or explanatory locutionary meaning—for example, propositions about planetary motions or the origin of species or the nature of photosynthesis. They are not typically simply reports of observable fact, except when functioning as evidence for hypotheses. They are not like the proposition that the cat is on the mat; they are more general and explanatory and “scientific”. Still, they are propositions equipped with truth conditions, so don’t differ in this respect from many other types of locutionary meaning. It isn’t as if we express propositions in scientific speech but not elsewhere (elsewhere it’s all emotive exclamations or some such). Scientific speech does not differ from other types of speech at the level of locutionary meaning, or not fundamentally. However, things change when we come to illocutionary force: here we have a significant shift in speaker intention. For in scientific discourse we are admonished to limit ourselves to what the evidence strictly warrants; we must be epistemically responsible. In this respect scientific speech differs dramatically from political speech. Thus, we find speech acts that begin “The evidence suggests” or “Experiments indicate” or “It is consistent with available data that”. The mark of such statements is that they are tentative, cautious, provisional. According to some views of science (Popper), we can never assert any general proposition because of the problem of induction; we can only assert statements recording episodes of falsification. The illocutionary force of a scientific speech act is captured in the formulation “So far p has not been refuted”. Scientific speech acts have the illocutionary force of conjectures not confident assertions of fact. This can be confusing to outsiders, because they are used to more committed forms of speech. The scientist really needs a special sign for his habitual illocutionary force: not Frege’s assertion sign but a sign meaning “I conjecture that the following may be the truth based on the evidence I have so far”. The scientist is engaged in a different type of language game, as Wittgenstein would say. His speech intentions differ from those of less responsible speakers. In this he is following the rules of scientific discourse and may be punished for violating them (expulsion from the scientific club).

            But it is in the area of perlocutionary effect that the most marked difference shows up. This is because science is, or can be, subversive, revolutionary, earth shattering. I don’t need to dwell on this story: Galileo, Spinoza, Darwin, Einstein, Dr Fauci, and many others. These effects are not all of the same kind. Some involve religion, but others involve technology and politics: I am thinking in particular of Einstein’s statement that his theories could be used to construct an atomic bomb. The scientist must be careful what he or she says, because the effects on hearers can be momentous. Think of the speech acts performed by scientists during a pandemic: they can save the lives of millions of people, and yet the scientist must stick to the illocutionary force that defines his calling. He must steer a fine line between securing the requisite perlocutionary effect and not overstating what the evidence warrants (and the evidence can change over time).[1] I was struck in reading Darwin’s Origin of Species by his careful acts of written speech: he wants to urge a specific theory of the way species come to exist, but he must be scrupulous about the evidence for his theory and the evidence (apparently) against it, because the perlocutionary effects are potentially so large. The scientific speech act becomes fraught, risky, possibly devastating. It almost becomes a performative, because it foreseeably performs an act of revolution (“I hereby destroy established religious orthodoxy”). Darwin’s speech is both scientific and activist, given its predictable perlocutionary effects—as was also true of Copernicus and Galileo.

            We can thus see how Austin’s threefold speech act theory, though designed for ordinary language, can be made to apply to the speech of scientists, revealing it as susceptible to the same basic treatment as others forms of speech, but also demonstrating interesting variation. This is an example of the general project of applying philosophical analyses of language to the case of scientific language, with an emphasis on pragmatics. Obviously much more needs to be said, but it’s a start.[2]

[1] We might say that the pure politician is concerned only with perlocutionary effect, targeting a specific audience.

[2] This kind of study might be useful to scientists in understanding and regulating their habits of speech (“Watch out for those perlocutionary effects!”). At present, speech concerning climate change is of particular concern.

Scientific Language Philosophy

We are familiar with Ordinary Language Philosophy, an Oxford product of the 1950s (perhaps partly derived from Wittgenstein in Cambridge). This approach has been criticized for its neglect of science, as if common sense is sufficient for a modern style of philosophy. But what about a different kind of linguistic turn—towards scientific language? We grant that ordinary language is an unsuitable focus of philosophical inquiry, but assert that the language of science provides the raw materials of philosophical reflection. We aren’t doing empirical science, to be sure, but we are scientifically informed: our focus is empirical scientific theory. We are a combination of Austin and Quine. Strangely, such a meta-philosophy has never been advocated, explicitly anyway. Yet it puts philosophy in close touch with science while still being recognizably philosophical. Such a philosophy could claim to be a priori and even to consist of analytic truths, but it takes its rise from the most modern of empirical theories. Scientific language has its place in the highest form of human knowledge (not in the metaphysics of the Stone Age, as Russell complained of ordinary language philosophy), so it provides the best possible basis for a scientifically informed philosophy. But it doesn’t collapse philosophy into a mere branch of empirical science, as a posteriori as science itself. Doesn’t this give us the best of both worlds? We lavish Austinian care on the language of science while taking Quinean delight in limiting ourselves to the scientific view of the universe. Now we know what to do with ourselves! Is philosophy, under this conception, “continuous with science”? Not if that means it is just more empirical science (it is still linguistically oriented and a priori); but it is certainly up to its neck in science, and hence shaped by the best empirical knowledge we have. We can still claim (if we like) that philosophy is concerned with “linguistic phenomenology” and that our focus is on the use of scientific language, but we cannot be charged with ignorance of science and slavish attachment to common sense.

            What form would this type of linguistic philosophy take? It need not be concerned with words as such: it can be directed towards meanings and concepts however these are to be understood. It can be concerned primarily with scientific sentences not individual scientific words (following Frege’s context principle). It can involve classical conceptual analysis (necessary and sufficient conditions etc.) or adopt a more relaxed view of conceptual elucidation (criteria of assertion or some such). It can emphasize the social aspects of scientific speech acts or it can remain resolutely individualistic. Presumably it will divide into subspecialties: some people will specialize in the language of physics, others the language of biology, others psychological language. We already have quite a bit of this going on, though without the overarching meta-philosophy I am outlining. Perhaps some concepts in science will be deemed bankrupt, or unhelpful, or obsolete. Perhaps there will be philosophical factions urging the superiority of some scientific words (and concepts) over others (no more talk of particles in physics just fields of force, for example). The linguistic philosopher need not be content to be merely descriptive; he or she can advocate for some linguistic usages over others. Philosophers and scientists can thus collaborate with each other. The result will be scientifically accurate and precisely formulated. Ordinary language can be left to its own dubious devices, according to this conception.

            For historical reasons, the linguistic turn is thought inseparable from ordinary language philosophy, but actually these are quite distinct ideas. In fact, the very distinction between ordinary language and scientific language is overblown and historically relative: words are often imported from common speech into scientific theories, and scientific words find their way into ordinary speech (“gravity”, “DNA”, “unconscious”). There is no principled opposition between the ordinary and the scientific (this is an “untenable dualism”), so there is nothing to impede the move towards a more science-oriented linguistic philosophy. I think a lot of good could come from systematic analysis of scientific terms, particularly in biology: verbal self-consciousness is always a useful antidote to confusion. Psychology was held back for a long time by uncritical use of the terms “stimulus” and “response”. So, let’s forge ahead with Scientific Language Philosophy (possibly supplemented by studies of the language of the humanities, as well as morals and politics). Botany would be a good place to start, given that botanists can’t even say what a plant is (it’s not an easy question).

Colin McGinn