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The Production of Novelty 57

novelty is ubiquitous. When one is striving to understand the production of
novelty, a focus on the brain as a material system is unhelpful.
in short, neither empiricism, formal logic nor neuroscience explains how
and why the production of novelty is possible. if the mind is a device to pro-
cess experience, how does it go beyond experience? if cognition is like a formal
symbol system, how does it transcend its axioms? if the brain is a physiological
machine governed by cause and effect – and what else could it be? – how does
it change its operation? The first and most basic task for a theory of creativity is
to specify a cognitive mechanism that is sufficient to produce novelty. 10

What is Creative about Creativity?

Fish do not need a concept of water. Concepts make distinctions and fish have
no opportunity to distinguish water from anything else. if we need a concept of
creativity, it is to contrast that which is creative with that which is not. a theory of
creativity should specify the features that distinguish the two. There is a prior ques-
tion: to what are we to apply the distinction between creative and non creative?
Some scholars differentiate between creative and noncreative products while
others distinguish between creative and noncreative individuals. Both approaches
are less useful than distinguishing between types of cognitive processes.

Products
it is irresistible to talk about products as more or less novel, and (therefore) as
more or less creative. an invention that is similar to an already existing device is
a mere improvement. Putting a wooden handle on a cast-iron pan to avoid frying
the cook’s hand is an example. a device that is further away in the space of possi-
ble designs is more novel and hence more creative. replacing the frying pan with
a microwave oven is a case in point. a new device has to be sufficiently far away
from its starting points if it is to qualify as creative. Creativity researchers have
experimented with different methods of measuring the creativity of products. 11
There are at least two conceptual difficulties. if degree of creativity is a
matter of similarity to prior products, then there is a point somewhere along
the similarity scale such that if a product is closer to its origins than that point,
it is not creative; if it is further away, then it is. But any such cutoff point is
arbitrary. two products close to the cutoff point but on different sides of it
are similar to each other, but, according to the product-oriented view, one is
creative while the other is not. This is not reasonable or helpful.
The point is not idle. Controversies about significant inventions some-
times turn on the claim that some proposed novelty is nothing but a minor