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Creative Insight: The Redistribution Theory 123

The Scope and Multiplicity principles are explications of the intuitive ideas
that a representational change is more difficult to achieve, the larger it is, and
that relaxing several constraints is more difficult than relaxing a single con-
straint. More stringent experimental tests have to await the derivation of yet
other predictions from the theory. The main strength of the theory is that it
improves on prior theories.

Relations to Prior Theories

Experimental psychologists tend to believe that scientific progress is served
by pitting theories against each other in a race for the best account of the
data. Although philosophers and historians of science agree that competitive
comparison is an important part of scientific method, psychologists’ advo-
cacy of this procedure is overdone. Theories are only in competition with one
another when two conditions are satisfied: Both theories aim to explain the
same phenomena, and the two theories are mutually exclusive in the strong
sense that if one theory is true, the other cannot also be true. In practice,
these two conditions hold less frequently than philosophers have assumed,
and they hardly ever hold in cognitive psychology. The more common case
is that two or more theories address different phenomena or make different
but compatible assertions. Research articles that present two or more equally
plausible but mutually exclusive theories and compare their relative fit to data
are in fact quite rare.
I see the task of theory building differently. There is no possibility that
any single principle or process will turn out to explain every aspect of human
cognition, or even every feature of insight, so we should hesitate to throw
away potentially useful principles and instead make the most of each one.
Principles proposed by different researchers are sometimes synonymous
once we look behind differences in terminology; they are more often com-
plementary than contradictory; and they are occasionally related as special
case to general principle. Researchers should identify those relations and
assemble a repertoire of explanatory principles that enable us to understand
as many aspects of creative insight as possible. Theory building should pro-
ceed through critical analysis and conceptual synthesis rather than through
selection by competition.

Alternative explanations for impasses?
The idea that impasses are caused by unhelpful prior knowledge has been redis-
covered multiple times. The Gestalt psychologists advanced two principles to