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64 Creativity

Theories of Novelty Production

The creativity questions have attracted much attention but remain unan-
swered, so the field of creativity research is a graveyard of unworkable answers.
The purpose of the rest of this chapter is to honor the fallen with epitaphs that
acknowledge their contributions. i discern in the seemingly diverse creativity
literature three principled answers to the question of how novelty is possible.
each principle captures one aspect of the truth; none, the whole truth. each
has generated a family of concepts and hypotheses that has grown in clarity
and explanatory power over time, and these advances need to be extracted
from their original contexts and brought forward to inform the next gen-
eration of creativity theories. The rational reconstructions in this section are
selective, partly chronological and partly systematic. Because it is common-
place to encounter multiple formulations of the same idea by authors who do
not acknowledge each other, this approach overestimates the orderliness of
intellectual history in order to facilitate critical examination.

Novelty Through Combination
One can produce something novel by combining entities in some way in which
they have not been combined before. Neither the things combined nor the type
of combination need to be novel for the result to be novel. The familiarity and
ordinariness of this principle veil its depth and importance. The explanatory
power of combinatorial processes resides in the disparity between the simplic-
ity of their inputs and the magnitude of their outputs. Five components cho-
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sen among no more than 10 potential components and related pairwise via any
one of three distinct types of connections – a rather modest generative mech-
anism – can produce more than 1.7 billion possible combinations. in general,
combinatorial processes generate vast possibility spaces. The size of such a space
increases rapidly with increases in the number of potential components and
potential connections, a phenomenon known as the combinatorial explosion.
The phenomenon is more familiar than the unfamiliar term suggests. The 26
letters in the alphabet suffice to spell the approximately 100,000 words in the
english language, as well as the many thousands of words yet to be invented.
The generativity of combination is also the secret behind the infinite diver-
sity of the material world, with atoms playing the role of parts and molecules
being the combinations. Billions of possibilities might suffice to encompass
even such ill-defined but vast possibility spaces as all possible paintings and
all possible machines.