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The Production of Novelty 85

itself, preferably so simple that we feel no need for further breakdown. The
Gestalt theory fails on this point. The holistic flipping to a better Gestalt is a
so-called homunculus, a supposed component that is so complex that it is no
easier to understand than the process of creative thinking itself.
The Gestalt theory of productive thinking cannot answer three of the four
creativity questions and it should be abandoned. it nevertheless teaches sev-
eral important lessons: Novelty is possible because problem situations do not
uniquely determine their own representations. acts of creation come about via
changes in representation. a change to a different representation is holistic in
character and the new representation may or may not preserve the prior divi-
sion into parts and wholes or between figure and background. The restructur-
ing process is non-monotonic in that the previous representation fades from
consciousness. We lack introspective access to the machinery of restructur-
ing and its triggering conditions are such that its occurrence is only indirectly
under voluntary control. The triggering conditions include careful analysis
of the problem situation and of the requirements of the goal. These ideas are
useful and should be carried forward into the next generation of creativity
theories.

A REPERTOIRE OF IDEAS
Progress is a bloody affair. There would be no biological evolution if the envi-
ronment did not kill large numbers of organisms before they reproduce. if
every organism passed on its genes, there would be no change and no new
species. in intellectual history, the destruction of ideas is equally necessary. Let
every theory flourish and we are stuck with the same bad old theories forever.
Progress requires selective pressure in the form of critical analysis.
The conceptual lineages that began in the late 19th century with works by
Darwin, Poincaré, Thorndike and Wertheimer have not resulted in a theory
that provides satisfactory answers to the creativity questions and the plethora
of theories their works have inspired should be abandoned. However, those
theories fail less due to what they say than to what they leave unsaid. Being
incomplete is less of a sin than being false, and a failure of this lesser sort does
not imply that a theory or a program of research made no contribution.
There is only a handful of fundamental answers to the question of how
novelty is possible: reality is layered, and everything, including ideas, prob-
lem solutions and products, is made of parts, and the parts can be combined
in different ways. The effects of successive actions accumulate over time, so
a sequence of actions can have a novel outcome, even if every action in the