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Creativity, Psychology and the History of Science

BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Editors ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University JÜRGEN RENN, Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science KOSTAS GAVROGLU, University of Athens

Editorial Advisory Board THOMAS F. GLICK, Boston University ADOLF GRÜNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University MARX W. WARTOFSKY†, (Editor 1960–1997)

VOLUME 245

CREATIVITY, PSYCHOLOGY AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE Edited by

Howard E. Gruber† Columbia University, New York, NY, U.S.A.

and

Katja Bödeker Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-10 ISBN-10 ISBN-13 ISBN-13

1-4020-3491-1 (HB) 1-4020-3509-8 (e-book) 978-1-4020-3491-6 (HB) 978-1-4020-3509-8 (e-book)

Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springeronline.com

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Springer No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed in the Netherlands.

TABLE OF CONTENTS vii

P REFACE by J ürgen Renn INTRODUCTION by Katja Bödeker

1

A LIFE WITH A PURPOSE

19

THE CREATIVE PERSON AS A WHOLE THE EVOLVING SYSTEMS APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF CREATIVE WORK

35

The Case Study Method and Evolving Systems Approach for Understanding Unique Creative People at Work

39

Inching Our Way up Mount Olympus: The Evolving-Systems Approach to Creative Thinking

65

Networks of Enterprise in Creative Scientific Work

89

THE CASE STUDY THAT STARTED IT ALL: CHARLES DARWIN

105

The Eye of Reason: Darwin’s Development during the Beagle Voyage

109

The Emergence of a Sense of Purpose: A Cognitive Case Study of Young Darwin

123

Going the Limit: Toward the Construction of Darwin’s Theory (1832-1839)

145

Diverse Relations between Psychology and Evolutionary Thought

167

FACETS OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS: INSIGHT, POINT OF VIEW AND REPETITION

193

Creativity and the Constructive Function of Repetition

195

On the Relation between “Aha Experiences” and the Construction of Ideas

201

The Cooperative Synthesis of Disparate Points of View

217

MODALITIES: THE STUFF OF EXPERIENCE

231

From Perception to Thought

235

Darwin’s “Tree of Nature” and Other Images of Wide Scope

241

Ensembles of Metaphors in Creative Scientific Thinking

259

The Life Space of a Scientist: The Visionary Function and Other Aspects of Jean Piaget’s Thinking

271

v

vi TRACKING THE ORDINARY COURSE OF DEVELOPMENT: PIAGETIAN REFLECTIONS

293

The Development of Object Permanence in the Cat

295

Introduction to the Essential Piaget

305

Piaget’s Mission

329

Which Way Is Up? A Developmental Question

345

COPING WITH THE EXTRAORDINARY: ON THE RELATION BETWEEN GIFTEDNESS AND CREATIVITY

365

On the Hypothesized Relation Between Giftedness and Creativity

367

The Self-Construction of the Extraordinary

383

Giftedness and Moral Responsibility: Creative Thinking and Human Survival

399

CREATIVITY IN THE MORAL DOMAIN

423

Creativity in the Moral Domain: Ought Implies Can Implies Create

427

Creativity and Human Survival

441

PEACE AND FURTHER CONDITIONS FOR HUMAN WELFARE

451

Man or Megaperson?

455

Peace Research, Where Is It Going? Optimism and the Inventor’s Paradigm

459

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF H. E. GRUBER’S WRITINGS

475

CITED REFERENCES

487

SUBJECT INDEX

519

NAME INDEX

525

PREFACE Jürgen Renn Psychologists have often exploited the history of science as a reservoir of examples for studies of creativity. In the same vein, historians of science occasionally refer to psychological research in order to enrich narrative accounts with insights into the working of the human mind. Howard Gruber’s contributions to the understanding of creativity are path-breaking because they distinguish themselves from these one-sided approaches. They stand out with their profound understanding of both the historical and the psychological dimensions of scientific creativity. Gruber’s insights are based on a combination of detailed case studies and the development of a theoretical framework that is closely integrated with his historical investigations. His work is part of the larger enterprise of conceiving human thinking as an evolving system driven by the reflection of interactions of the subject with the real world, an enterprise launched by Jean Piaget with whom Gruber collaborated intensively. This book offers a comprehensive survey of Gruber’s work and focuses on the heritage he left behind for building a historical theory of the development of human knowledge in which individual creativity can be understood within its changing historical contexts. It covers a broad array of his work and opens with two introductions, one by Katja Bödeker, which places this work within the framework of different theoretical approaches bearing on the relation between psychology and the history of science. The second introduction is written by Howard Gruber himself and offers a masterfully succinct account of his evolving systems approach. The idea for this book emerged during a memorable visit of Howard Gruber and his wife Doris Wallace to the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in the summer of 1999. The plan to assemble Gruber’s widely dispersed publications into this collection and hence reveal the hidden bonds that make evident the coherence of his life work was first conceived by my friend and colleague Peter Damerow, who also suggested the name of Katja Bödeker as a collaborator on this project. vii

viii

Katja Bödeker, a student of Wolfgang Edelstein, director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, is a psychologist and historian of science working in the interdisciplinary tradition founded by Howard Gruber. In her dissertation she has analyzed intuitive physical knowledge developed in widely differing cultural backgrounds. She has thus significantly contributed to our understanding of the interplay between universal and culture-specific dimensions in the knowledge underlying scientific thinking. Her familiarity with both the wide range of theoretical approaches in cognitive psychology and the questions of historical epistemology, as pursued at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, made her an ideal cooperation partner for Howard Gruber. During an extended visit with Howard Gruber and Doris Wallace in New York, this cooperation grew into a friendship. Last but not least, it is also Doris Wallace’s unfailing engagement and encouragement that enabled this ambitious project to be brought to a successful conclusion. In the last months before its completion, this joint endeavor was overshadowed by Howard Gruber’s grave illness. To our great chagrin, his unexpected death unfortunately prevented him from seeing the book published. All of us who have known him will forever miss his wisdom and wit, his friendliness and human warmth. May this volume serve as a reminder of what one can achieve in a life with a purpose.

INTRODUCTION

Growth of knowledge is not the subject of a single dedicated discipline. Even within psychology, the acquisition, development and transmission of knowledge are addressed by sub-disciplines such as developmental psychology, expertise research, cognitive psychology, or creativity research, each pursuing the topic in a theoretically and methodologically distinct way. Outside the realm of psychology, historians of science analyze historical forms of knowledge and how they change, whereas anthropologists focus on the interaction between knowledge and its cultural and linguistic contexts—just to give two examples. This disciplinary variety testifies that growth of knowledge transcends the confines of a single discipline. Though academic division of labour is generally appreciated as one of the most innovative ways of conducting science, the disciplinary splitting up of a topic often rests on presuppositions which may lead a research enterprise into false directions. So, for instance, the psychological perspective on the growth of knowledge is often ahistorical. The evolution of cognitive constructs, such as number, the species concept, or the idea of the self, is taken to proceed according to developmental stages or laws which hold universally, irrespective of historical or cultural determinants. Furthermore, historical underpinnings of the topic itself—such as the changing use of knowledge, its storage or distribution—are mostly disregarded. How, therefore, can research on the growth of knowledge be conducted which doesn’t run into disciplinary reductionism? The answer seems to be straightforward: Research on the growth of knowledge should be interdisciplinary! Yet the magic word “interdisciplinarity” exposes rather than solves the problem. What would interdisciplinary research on the growth of knowledge look like? Would it mean large conferences with participants from various disciplines? Would it mean the establishment of new research centers which are no longer organized along traditional disciplinary lines? This volume presents another way of conducting research on the growth of knowledge, which crosses intra- and interscientific frontiers. This volume is a collection of the writings of Howard E. Gruber. In academic psychology, Gruber is widely known for his outstanding research on scientific creativity—in particular for his study on the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution (Gruber 1974). It is thus tempting to subordinate Gruber’s work into one of academic psychology’s compartments, i.e. creativity research. But as the broad scope of Gruber’s writings reveals, his work resists assignment to a neatly delineated research field. Apart from his contribution to our understanding of scientific creativity, Gruber inter alia worked on visual perception, on science education and—as a temporary collaborator of Jean Piaget—on cognitive development. Furthermore, he spent a considerable part of his productive energies on political issues, and so, for example, delineated an agenda for psychological peace research. H. E. Gruber and K. Bödeker (eds.), Creativity, Psychology and the History of Science, 1-18. © 2005 Springer.

2 Yet Gruber was not only an extraordinarily versatile man with wide-ranging scientific interests. As this volume aims to show, Gruber’s multiple enterprises are integrated on the trajectory of an intellectual developmental course which, though surprising at first glance, is consistent and understandable. Standing at the crossroads of several disciplines, Gruber’s detailed analyzes of the growth of thought as well as his way of approaching the question of how new ideas come into being make apparent the shortcomings that the disciplinary splitting of the topic of growth of knowledge entails. At first sight, Gruber’s work seems to fall into psychology’s young field of creativity research. Considering the role, though, that social and cultural surroundings play in his cognitive case studies, psychologists might be tempted to push off Gruber’s work into history of science. However, as Gruber’s case studies address the development of thought, its structural make-up, the anatomy of conceptual changes as well as their preconditions, the questions that Gruber pursues are psychological. Following the borderlines of academia, they would fall within the range of developmental psychology. Moreover, if psychology took the challenge of situating the growth of ideas or thoughts culturally and historically, Gruber’s work would form part of its disciplinary core. In the following some of the fundamental lines of Gruber’s approach will be presented by situating it within the field of creativity research. His perspective on creative work will be contrasted with two psychological approaches to creativity: the psychometric approach and the creative cognition approach. Secondly, it will be pointed out how Gruber’s work can contribute to our understanding of the growth of knowledge. ROOTS AND PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOMETRIC RESEARCH ON CREATIVITY Creation is a phenomenon that has attracted philosophers and scientists for centuries. Scientific discoveries or original works of art are surrounded by an aura of mystery as their production seems to surmount ordinary human capacities. The notion of genius, so prominent in European intellectual movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, mirrors this enigma of scientific or artistic invention and turns it into a particular quality of the creator. In its production, the genius doesn’t imitate, it creates, it doesn’t follow rules, but establishes them. To nature, the genius entertains an intimate relation: The comparison between natural generation and the productive forces of the genius was widespread in the eighteenth century. Moreover, genius was regarded as appertaining to nature. As “don de la nature,” it could not be acquired through scholarly diligence. In his Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant defined genius as “the innate mental aptitude (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art.” Inaugurating the disenchantment of genius, Francis Galton can be regarded as the originator of the psychometric approach to creativity. His famous Hereditary Genius (Galton 1869) displays some of the basic assumptions of modern differential psychology (assumptions that Gruber repudiates): The person is conceived as composed

INTRODUCTION

3

of fixed situation-independent attributes, mental excellence being one of them. For the assessment of mental excellence, Galton isolated individual performance or even reputation—a feature whose dependence on social processes can hardly be overlooked—from their social embeddings and took them as expressions of the individual’s stable characteristics. In order to show statistically that intellectual excellence, as any physical attribute, is inherited, Galton adopted statistical tools from Quetelet, the most prominent one being the “law of deviation from an average,” which later became known as the normal distribution. Measurement thus demanded its tribute: instead of describing the ways in which the creative person is extraordinary in its true sense, i.e. incomparable to others, “mental excellence” was reduced to a single dimension on which individuals are arranged according to their outcome in a series of comparisons. The set of interindividual differences thus determined the degree of mental excellence ascribed to the individual. Comparing the distribution of the examination marks obtained by seventy-two applicants for the Royal Military College with the numbers predicted by Quetelet’s law, Galton reported a good fit: Mental abilities showed the same pattern of variation as heritable physical attributes such as body measures. In order to provide even stronger evidence for the heritability of mental excellence, Galton analyzed the pedigrees of “eminent” English men such as judges or statesmen. If intellectual ability was inherited, his argument went, the number of eminent cases in the family of an eminent man should decrease with hereditary distance: Galton’s results seemed to corroborate this hypothesis. In his book on genius, however, Galton had to rely on examination grades in order to measure mental excellence quantitatively. Though a couple of practices assessing individual differences were common at that time, no scientific technique was available which would allow the researcher to derive assessment data suitable for statistical analysis. In his laboratory in London, Galton himself worked on the development of techniques which promised to measure mental “faculties.” In the end, his mostly sensory tasks did not prepare the ground for the kind of investigation of creative abilities that was to come. The psychometric approach to creativity took over the methodology of the mental testing approach whose application in intelligence research had become paradigmatic for research on personality in general. It is mentioned in most historical surveys on creativity research that it was only after World War II that psychologists realized the social demand for tools assessing creative potential. Both academic achievement as well as scores in ordinary intelligence tests turned out to be insufficient in identifying the ability to invent or to find solutions in new situations. But psychology had nothing much to offer: Research on creativity was scarce at that time. The few studies that existed were mostly in-depth examinations of insightful problem solving (Wertheimer 1945) or historiometric studies (Cox 1926), neither of which addressed the public need for selection tools.

4 Representing an accepted research tradition, both in academia and among the public, the mental testing tradition could serve as a model, providing methodological guidelines that helped to close this gap. Its fundamental presuppositions were taken over rapidly by creativity researchers: Creativity became an attribute that was stable across situations and domains. Instead of being ascribed exclusively to the few great creators, creativity was taken as a continuous trait that everybody had to a certain degree. These assumptions guaranteed that the measurement of creativity could take place in the standard fashion, i.e. by paper-and-pencil tests that were administered to a great number of people. Historically, the trait orientation of the psychometric approach to creativity may be explained by the diagnostic impetus backing its earliest steps. Creativity research at that time aimed at the identification and selection of people with high creative potential rather than describing creative activities in depth. As will become clear in this book, Gruber’s approach to creativity diverges from the psychometric tradition in several respects. In the psychometric approach, creativity is a domain-independent general-purpose ability that can be distilled from possible content. A person is creative to a certain degree, and his degree of creativity should show up in cooking in the same manner as in the elaboration of a scientific theory. Gruber repeatedly points to one of the general problems of the psychometric approach: The creativity measures that have been developed in this tradition show only poor correspondence to real-world creative achievement and suffer from a lack of validity. A further point of Gruber’s critique is the questionable fruitfulness of the explanatory strategy launched by the psychometric approach to creativity. What can be learned about creative accomplishments such as scientific discovery or artistic invention—their possible origins as well as their genesis—if one just ascribes them to the high creativity of the creator? A further problem is raised by the requirements of statistical data processing. As the creativity measures have to yield results that are amenable to statistical analysis, psychometric techniques require large samples and the researcher must lower selection criteria. Instead of confining his examination to the few prominent creators of the domain in question—as Gruber does in his case studies—, the researcher must increase the range of study in order to validate statements statistically: Thus individuals are included who may have been quite successful in their respective professions, but, as Gruber points out, most are far from revolutionizing their domain. Psychometric analyses typically provide moderate correlations between the trait named creativity and intelligence, the number of siblings or the “openness to experience” scores on the “Big Five.” Unquestionably, correlations like these can serve as clues to remote conditions of creative achievement. They may indicate that some sort of relationship exists between creativity and the features in question, but, as they do not aim at the creative process directly, correlations won’t address Gruber’s main interest: how creative work is actually done.

INTRODUCTION

5

THE CREATIVE COGNITION APPROACH TO CREATIVITY A further tradition of research on creativity which should be mentioned in order to highlight Gruber’s perspective on this notion is the creative cognition approach (for more recent publications see Smith,Ward and Finke 1995; Sternberg and Davidson 1995), in fact, Gruber refers to this line of creativity research in several of the papers in this volume. The creative cognition approach has its roots in Gestalt psychology. Köhler’s description of insight (Köhler 1976), Duncker’s study of problem solving (Duncker 1945), and especially Wertheimer’s Productive Thinking (Wertheimer 1945) still form its groundwork. The approach has more recently been bolstered by methodological and theoretical tools adopted from the Cognitive Sciences. In contrast to psychometric research on creativity, work on creative thinking addresses the creative process itself. Studies in this tradition analyze thought processes leading to original ideas, to sudden insights or to representational reorganizations. Instead of taking creativity as a trait coming in grades or as a virtue pertaining to the very few, creativity is regarded here as an essential property of human thinking in general: The human mind is generative and so are its products. The main purpose of the creative cognition approach is to analyze the structural underpinnings of creative thought processes. Here, creative thinking was shown to take place as conceptual combination, grouping, generalization, analogical reasoning etc. In order to lay bare the essential features of creative thought as neatly as possible, researchers often rely on experimental methods. In the standard setting, the subjects have to work on a task that requires some sort of creative invention—they have to solve classical insight problems, design new furniture, or construct a practical device out of given geometrical forms. Based on the results thus obtained, the cognitive operations applied by the subjects are then carefully examined. In this kind of investigation, a similarity between creative cognition studies and the psychometric approach becomes apparent. In both traditions, the creative process is cut off from its possible content. The measures commonly used in the psychometric tradition assess “pure” creativity, and claim to disentangle creative potential from mere expertise or knowledge. In the studies of the creative cognition approach on the other hand, the anatomy of creative thinking is examined in the laboratory, i.e. in a sphere that is detached from the challenges of a real-life creative endeavor. A second point of similarity between the creative cognition and the psychometric approach is their generalist view of creativity. Creativity is either conceptualized as a universal characteristic of human cognition in general, or it is taken as a dimensional feature of different levels but in principle pertaining to everybody. Both the generalist grasp of creativity as well as the abstraction from the content of creative achievement diverge from Gruber’s perspective on creative work. Gruber studies the work of extraordinary individuals, unambiguous cases of creative accomplishment—“humanity at its best” (p. 272). Limiting the range of study to exceptional scientific creators and their work, Gruber’s approach avoids the problem that afflicts ordinary psychological research on creativity, i.e. that of establishing

6 valid external criteria for creative products. By not analyzing genuine creative accomplishments, both the creative cognition approach and the psychometric tradition must continually corroborate the validity of their findings. In Gruber’s studies of extraordinary creative individuals, the process of thought is seen in a whole person working under real historical circumstances. Since he aims to reconstruct the evolution of a creative accomplishment in the individual’s actual field of endeavor, Gruber does not isolate the creative process from its object. GRUBER’S APPROACH TO CREATIVITY: STUDYING CREATIVE WORK THROUGH CASE STUDIES

Following Gruber’s approach, we learn about creativity where it manifests itself most clearly—in the accomplishments of extraordinary creative people. Instead of assessing creativity through experiments or paper-and-pencil tests, Gruber recontextualizes creative work in cognitive case studies. A creative case study in Gruber’s sense is directed at the whole person in full historical context. Conducting case studies in this vein imposes a heavier burden on the researcher, as it requires familiarity with the creator’s domain as well as with the historical and cultural surroundings, i.e. it might require prerequisites that do not form part of the ordinary academic curriculum in psychology. The focus of the case study is on the creative individual and his development rather than on basic components of short-time cognitive processes or on general indicators of creativity. It is suggestive to put this difference in terms of psychology’s old controversy between nomothetic and idiographic methodology. Should psychological science formulate general laws that hold every time and everywhere, or should it carefully describe and reconstruct single facts, i.e. unique cases? The concentration on the unique case that characterizes Gruber’s approach to creative work might in part be motivated by a wish to “rescue the individual”; the decision to examine creativity in case studies of extraordinary creative individuals however should not solely be put down to philosophical convictions about the worth of individuality per se. Stressing the uniqueness of the case in question primarily sets a methodological guideline: Each person is unique in a unique way, and the case study reconstructs the unique organization of the course of the person’s work. It thus aims to formulate a theory of the individual, as Gruber repeatedly points out. This objective is not met by just pointing to this or that extraordinary ability pertaining to the creative individual, to his supreme intelligence or his extraordinary musicality. The “theory of the individual” encompasses the unique “organization of the system, an organization that was constructed by the person himself in the course of his life, in the course of his work, as needed in order to meet the tasks that he encountered and that he set himself” (Gruber 1985c, p.177). The case study method is backed by the so-called “evolving systems approach” which conceives of the person as a system of loosely coupled subsystems—knowledge, purpose and affect. Following this idea, a case study of creative work has to be

INTRODUCTION

7

situated at several levels. First, the path taken by the creator must be traced at the cognitive level. In a case study the creator’s belief-system and its evolution within a certain time will be thoroughly reconstructed. A second level of analysis is opened up by the field of motivation or, in Gruber’s terms, by the creator’s organization of purpose. Case studies of creative people usually address the person’s development within an extended time span, i.e. the analysis will cover a period of several years rather than being confined to some brief moments of illumination. Due to this broad range, creative activity is manifest as work that must be directed and organized. The creator probably won’t be absorbed by a single undertaking only, within the period at issue, he might pursue several strands of work whose interrelations have to be steadily orchestrated. Furthermore, he might have a vision or an idea—as inarticulate as it might be—giving his work direction. In thus revealing regulatory mechanisms such as the creator’s network of enterprise or the initial sketch, the case study displays creative work as a purposeful undertaking orchestrated by the individual. Taking creation as the outgrowth of purposeful activity is to be contrasted to the romantic view of the creator as a vessel passively receiving his earth-shaking ideas either from God, the Weltgeist or from the arcane murmuring of his subconscious. Gruber’s perspective on the purposefulness of creative work also differs from the view of motivation prevailing in the research literature. In that view, creativity research was chiefly concerned with enduring attitudes to work and their probable impact on outcome. Are highly creative people striving for external rewards—success, fame, money—, or are they pursuing activities for their own sake, i.e. do they derive pleasure and fulfilment from their work alone? A creative case study, however, dissects a broad and generalized orientation such as “intrinsic motivation” and reveals the regulatory devices that the creative person relies on in order to organize and coordinate his undertakings and to keep his high commitment to work alive. The third level of the creative case study is affect. In his studies, Gruber emphasizes the role of positive affects such as the joy of insight, courage, passion, or aesthetic pleasure. In particular, the case of affect demonstrates that knowledge, purpose and affect are not separated from each other and should not be treated as such in the case study. The creator’s “initial sketch” can be taken as exemplifying the interdependence of the three systems. As a rough draft of the opus to follow—Gruber terms it the “gyroscope of the oeuvre”— it first provides the creator’s work with a sense of direction, i.e. it acts as another regulatory mechanism on the motivational plane. The initial sketch also comprises in nuce basic ideas of the oeuvre to come later and is thus driving as well as guiding the evolution of the creator’s belief-system. Lastly, the initial sketch might express some of the profoundest commitments the creator is attached to. The young Piaget’s Mission de l’Idée exemplifies this affective aspect of the “initial sketch” vividly. It foreshadows one of Piaget’s central ideas—équilibration majorante—but expresses it in the form of a poem that touches fundamentals of the human condition such as the meaning of life and transcending death.

8 Considering the primary aims of the case study method—the meticulous reconstruction of a single creator’s development—, its orientation towards the work of the unique person, and its comprehensive scope encompassing the historical and the cultural context in which the creative individual is situated, the question arises: how does an endeavor like this differs from an ordinary historical study? Doesn’t such an enquiry fall into the range of art history or history of science rather than into that of academic psychology? Can we draw any kind of psychological conclusions from a case study? Does its focus on the incomparable and extraordinary aspects of the person’s creative development not rule out the possibility of deriving principles that hold for creative work in general? As demonstrated in many of the papers to follow, immersion in a single case does not necessarily preclude general statements about the nature of creative activity. The purported trade-off between concentration on the individual creator on the one hand, and generalizations on the other is deceiving. First of all, there are now quite a number of creative case studies available that provide the opportunity for a psychologically oriented synthesis. Furthermore, the ideas Gruber introduces in his work distinguish his approach from ordinary historical analyses. Feldman et al. (1994) take the establishment of so-called “middle-level concepts” to be one of the most distinctive features of Gruber’s case studies. Middle-level concepts such as the notion of a “network of enterprise” organize the abundant historical material of a case and thus can work as the researcher’s analytical tools. But besides their function as methodological instruments, middle-level concepts display aspects of creative work itself: they grasp general features of the shape of a creative life without thereby reducing its complexity. Thus Gruber has developed concepts that represent and guide creative work, e.g. “network of enterprise” or “ensemble of metaphor.” These concepts have emerged from Gruber’s very close and detailed analysis of the creative work of his case studies. At the same time, these same concepts have also become methodological tools used by others in case study work. Finally—and this point will be elaborated further in the pages to follow—, Gruber’s work has implications for the psychological characterization of individual development, i.e. for theorizing about human development in a broader sense. First of all, looking at Gruber’s case studies as well as his theoretical papers, it becomes obvious that his approach to creativity is developmental in orientation—developmental taken in a very specific way: Gruber does not focus on the average creative person’s developmental trajectory, he does not aim to establish the developmental milestones for an “idealtypic creator,” such as early emergence of specific interests, strong parental encouragement etc. Neither does Gruber restrict himself to a historical reconstruction of the genesis of the oeuvre itself independently of the person. Instead, Gruber analyzes creative work over a longer timespan: he looks at how the creative person purposely regulates his involvement with one or several enduring cognitive undertakings. Thus Gruber draws our attention to unique, self-directed and purposeful work, i.e. to a type of development often neglected by research on cognitive development.

INTRODUCTION

9

Considering Gruber’s beginnings as an experimental psychologist doing research on size and distance perception, there was hardly any indication either of his interest in creative development or of his later liaison with the history of science. When I asked him what drove a young experimental psychologist to start doing research work on Darwin, he answered something like: “Oh, I became interested in longer thought processes”—as if there was nothing more obvious in this case than to immerse himself in Darwin’s notebooks! Of course, “longer thought processes” has a wide range of possible meanings in psychology. In experimental cognitive psychology thought processes extending over several seconds are exceptionally long, and a range of several minutes would make cognitive processes in most cases unanalyzable experimentally. Timespans of months or even years definitely transcend the limits of cognitive experimental research. Investigating thought processes of this range would force the researcher to switch domains and pass over to cognitive developmental psychology. And so it might have been no mere accident that Gruber started to become interested in the work of Jean Piaget. In 1955, he was invited to Geneva to give a talk on the relation between perception and cognition, but this short trip formed only the prelude of Gruber’s later cooperation with Piaget. HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN PIAGET’S GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY AND IN GRUBER’S APPROACH TO CREATIVE WORK Gruber’s cooperation with Piaget was long-lasting and productive. Gruber returned several times to the Centre International d’Epistemologie Génétique founded and headed by Piaget. One of the main aims of Gruber’s stays in Geneva was the preparation of a one-volume extract of and commentary on Piaget’s extensive oeuvre—The Essential Piaget, still one of the classics in developmental psychology. Piaget’s concerns and Gruber’s interest meet in one important way: both of them work historically in order to answer questions arising from their psychological research on cognitive development. Piaget and Gruber both attempt to bridge developmental psychology and history of science, but they pursue this aim from fundamentally different perspectives. Piaget laid the foundation of a comprehensive theory of knowledge. His genetic epistemology, intended as a kind of metascience, analyzes scientific knowledge from the perspective of development. This genetic approach provides the framework for the Piagetian connection between developmental psychology and history of science. Piaget’s vision of genetic epistemology as a science conjoining historico-critical and psychogenetic methods is based on theoretical presuppositions that touch the relation between cognitive development and history of science. Ontogenesis and historiogenesis, according to this assumption, share functional mechanisms that give both developmental lines a definite shape. In Piaget’s theory, development occurs as an ordered evolution of structures, with this structural growth process following a certain logic. It is no secret that Piaget’s main focus was on general cognitive structures. He was interested in the evolution of the universal epistemic “core” rather than in the individual and its development. Creativity, taken in the strict sense of the term, was

10 thus not a main concern for him. Piaget may have considered the topic as a bit too hazy, too individual-centered and thus running counter to his goal to establish a general theory of knowledge and its evolution. Highlighting the individual rather than the universal, Gruber’s case study approach diverges from the perspective taken by Piaget. Gruber’s emphasis on unique aspects of development, however, is no mere crude rejection of Piaget’s “single-pathway” theory. Gruber provides fine-grained descriptions of processes of change and the theoretical framework guiding these patient reconstructions—the idea of a loose coupling between knowledge, purpose, and affect—puts into focus the role of the individual in development, an aspect somewhat neglected by Piaget. Piaget’s program of genetic epistemology transcended the confines of his early research on cognitive development in ontogeny. Following the generalized genetic approach outlined in the Introduction à l’épistémologie génétique (Piaget 1950c), the epistemologist has to understand both present and past scientific knowledge as functions of their specific developmental preconditions, instead of taking them as either timeless facts or as deficient precursors of later truths. For genetic epistemology, Piaget proposed a close cooperation between developmental psychology and the history of science, in his words between the psychogenetic and the historical-critical method. The historical-critical method traces the development of concepts such as number, space or time in history with the aim of comparing the structures underlying them. However, as scientific knowledge in its different historical stages already represents an advanced level of thinking, a historical-critical approach alone won’t reach the point where knowledge and thinking originated. According to Piaget, it is the psychogenetic method that provides access to elementary stages of thinking. As an “intellectual embryology” it can describe forms of thinking that lie beyond the reach of historical analysis. Piaget, though not adhering to a crude onto-phylogenetic parallelism, proposed a functional correspondence between ontogenesis and historiogenesis in his earliest publications and, as the posthumously published study Psychogenesis and the History of Science (Piaget and Garcia 1989) testifies, he clung to this view throughout his whole life. According to Piaget, conceptual development in childhood and the historical transformation of concepts share the same regulatory mechanisms. The tendency to equilibrium—Gruber repeatedly mentions this idea in the following papers—is probably the regulatory mechanism that is most pronounced in Piaget’s theory. Already the young Piaget claims to have found a functional constant of thinking. In Logique génétique et sociologie (Piaget 1928b), he takes mental formations in general to be products of an effort for systematization, an attempt to establish coherence taking shape in discrepant forms of organization, in different structures. According to Piaget these structures form stages of a single developmental process with a definite direction set by its functional determinant—equilibration. In the Introduction Piaget postulates a similar functional principle common to historiogenesis and psychogenesis: both are characterized by a developmental tendency to reversible states of equilibrium. Piaget takes these forms of equilibrium as limits a

INTRODUCTION

11

genetic series converges to. Still in Psychogenesis and the History of Science, the assumption of developmental mechanisms operating both in ontogenesis and in scientific development provides the main methodological principle that guides the historical analyzes. The universal functional mechanisms proposed by Piaget give conceptual change in history and in ontogenesis a definite shape. Cognitive development occurs as a progression from structure to structure, with each stage representing a form superior to its predecessor. To put it in broadest terms, during the construction of a novel structure the main features of the preceding level become integrated into the new structure, and are reorganized, generalized and projected at a higher level. The progressive succession of structures that thus emerges obtains a semblance of inevitability. As a given structure depends on the preceding levels and prepares the ground for those to follow, scientific as well as developmental innovations seem to form only components in a sequence of structures that as a whole is determined by universal developmental mechanisms. In several of his papers on development, Gruber refers to this view as “logical determinism”: “... the functioning of the logic of each stage determines the structure of the stage that follows” (p.325). The sequence of the different stages implies a “unilinear” model of structural evolution, one that precludes the individual’s development along alternative pathways. As each stage provides the precondition for the structures to follow, i.e. for structures which are better equilibrated and have a broader range, Gruber holds that the Piagetian view of development is based on an idea of progress. This structural account shapes Piaget’s ideas of scientific change. In his writings on science history, Piaget does not analyze how the conscious, directed effort of an individual can contribute to conceptual innovation in science. Instead, conceptual change is regarded as a temporal disequilibration of a given structure, caused by its accommodation to new discoveries, and its succeeding reequilibration within a higher-order structure. In several of his articles, Gruber repeatedly points out where his interests as well as his point of view differ from Piaget’s theoretical commitments: “My own research and writing has for some time been centered on the creative process. I have been interested in the unique rather than the universal, leading me sometimes to speak disparagingly of one-track developmental theories such as Piaget’s” (p.341). Considering Gruber’s critique of the unilinear Piagetian model together with his emphasis on uniqueness and the idea of multiple developmental pathways (at least in adult development), a few catchy dichotomies seem to offer themselves: the individual vs. the epistemic subject, the unique vs. the universal, and plurality vs. unilinearity. But multidirectionality of development alone is not very original. The eminent role of the notion of uniqueness in Gruber’s research reflects his interest in the meticulous reconstruction of processes of change—a topic somewhat neglected by Piaget. Describing the multiple configurations of ideas and strategies that emerge during the

12 course of cognitive change requires the intense study of very few subjects over a certain time—that is why Gruber greatly appreciated the work of the strategies group headed by Bärbel Inhelder (Inhelder 1992). The uniqueness of creative individuals, however, is not a mere fact. It may represent a developmental norm the creative person aims at. As Gruber repeatedly remarks in the following pages, the creative individual needs a set of personal resources in order to pursue his enterprises; he needs “the self and world knowledge necessary to move purposefully and effectively in a direction” (p.394). Personal prerequisites of creative accomplishments include strategies that guide the individual’s work. Adopting an idea from cybernetics, Gruber speaks of deviation-amplifying systems that individuals might rely upon, i.e. “heuristics for identifying unusual ideas, recording them, and elaborating them” (p.356). Thus, Gruber points out that the person purposefully utilizes strategies and skills which move him away from pre-existing norms. A perspective that takes creative development as self-directed brings aspects of creativity to light that are neither purely cognitive nor entirely motivational but which—to use Gruber’s terms—mediate the system of purpose and system of belief. Gruber’s work provides many examples for facets of this kind. The “sense of purpose” enables the individual to see each “sub-task in its place, as a part of the larger task he has set himself” (Gruber 1974, 113), the “point of view” denotes a perspective “from which new problems are seen and old ones are seen in a new light“ (p.57). The “network of enterprise” or the “initial sketch” represent further cognitive-motivational facets of the creative process. The idea of a self-directed course the creator takes in his work makes an important point for the psychological conceptualization of human development: In characterizing creative development as a process of “self-construction” (p.383), Gruber underlines the regulatory mechanisms the individual applies in order to orchestrate his work over long periods of time and, thereby, he shows creative development as a purposeful growth process rather than a quasi-natural unfolding of gifts or a unilinear sequence of stages. The divergent accounts of development proposed by Piaget and Gruber could give the impression that both were fundamentally opposed and had nothing in common. Taking Piaget’s perspective on the one hand, we see the epigenetic landscape from a higher point, and recognize the universal structural make-up of developmental processes. Gruber, on the other hand, invites us to delve into the complexity of development as it appears from the point of view of the individual. We recognize the large number of pathways open to the individual at a given point, as well as the strategies and procedures the person uses in order to stay on his chosen developmental track. Both accounts, however, have commonalities that Piaget brings out in his foreword to Darwin on Man—Gruber’s in-depth study of a scientist thinking. In this comment, Piaget highlights two aspects of Gruber’s Darwin study. He emphasizes the slow rate of theory formation which shows that the construction of a new theory “necessitates an extremely complex structuring of interpretive ideas” (Piaget 1974b,

INTRODUCTION

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ix). Furthermore, Piaget describes this structure-building as a reflective process during which schemas implicitly contained in already established cognitive formations are made explicit in a partly new structure. In mentioning these two aspects, Piaget underscores facets of Gruber’s study where his own perspective and Gruber’s account of Darwin’s scientific development converge. Gruber himself, asserting the slow tempo of cognitive change, emphatically criticizes inspirationist accounts of creative activity. In his analysis of the growth of Darwin’s theory of evolution, he shows that the idea of natural selection occurs in Darwin’s notebooks before the celebrated “Malthusian insight” took place. Finally—and this is where my comparison of Piaget and Gruber began—both sought to bridge developmental psychology and the history of science. Piaget as well as Gruber recognize history of science as a field that can serve as a source of material for developmental research. Thus, both approach the historical evidence with questions that differ from those usually pursued by historians. In addition, both men also attempt to demonstrate what developmental psychology has to contribute to our understanding of the course of scientific development, the historical growth of knowledge, and theoretical change. HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN RECENT PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES Gruber’s and Piaget’s endeavors to bridge developmental psychology and the history of science no longer stand alone. Now that developmental psychologists have discovered history as well as philosophy of science as fields of theoretical inspiration, scientific change has become a widespread model for the description of ontogenetic development in psychology—and quite a fashionable one too. The theory that goes the farthest in its theoretical borrowing from the history of science is the “theory theory” as propounded by Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997). The central tenet of this theory is “that the processes of cognitive development in children are similar to, indeed perhaps even identical with, the processes of cognitive development in scientists” (Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997, 3). Further cases of history of science-inspired theorizing in developmental psychology are not difficult to come by. Carey (1985; 1991) adopts Kuhn’s doctrine of the incommensurability of disciplinary matrices and applies it to the description of cognitive development. Based on Kuhn’s criteria for a conceptual change in science, she argues that children hold theories of matter, of weight, or of living things that are incommensurable with the adults’ theories. Frequently, the “theory” notion in psychology is coupled with the idea that cognitive development proceeds domain-specifically. Wellman and Gelman (1992), for example, reject general logico-mathematical structures or components of the cognitive architecture as possible factors accounting for knowledge organization and for developmental change in thinking. Instead, they posit content-specific systems of knowledge in domains such as physics, psychology, and biology that provide persons with basic ontological dis-

14 tinctions and explanatory principles. Wellman and Gelman (1992) term these foundational knowledge systems “framework theories”—a notion they liken to Kuhn’s paradigms or to Lakatos’ research programs. Piaget is often accredited with having coined the image of the child as scientist. However, the range of this attribution is limited. Admittedly, Piaget held the view that children, like scientists, have to actively explore their environment in order to learn. But beyond this anti-empiricist truism, the alleged historical continuity between Piaget and the “theory theorists” is misleading since it veils the divergent epistemological presuppositions underlying each approach. Piaget’s concern for the evolution of the sciences was not prompted by some idea of transferring methodological or descriptive instruments from philosophy of science to the study of cognitive development in children. On the contrary, as mentioned above, his genetic epistemology entailed a comprehensive study encompassing the growth of knowledge both in history and in individual development (Kitchener 1986). In Piaget’s theory of knowledge, mechanisms such as equilibration or reflective abstraction provide the analytical framework for an undertaking of such dimensions, since those factors are assumed to operate in both developmental lines and thus render it feasible to trace their course with a unified theoretical framework. The “theory”-inspired developmental psychologists on the other hand adopt scientific theories as models for children’s knowledge. Children’s understanding of persons or their interpretations of natural phenomena are based on knowledge structures which involve theoretical constructs, such as beliefs and desires, or concepts of unobservable entities. These theory-like knowledge structures are lawfully interrelated, are thus coherent, and can fulfill explanatory and predictive purposes. The theory theorists assimilate the development of children’s cognitive structures to theory dynamics. For the case of theory dynamics in science, Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997) propose an account of theory change that is supposed to provide a condensed version of the relevant philosophical literature: Proponents of the old theory first deny the empirical counterevidence, but later attempt to save the theory through the construction of ad hoc hypotheses. Finally, the new theory emerges—often as an extension of an idea that was already implicit in the earlier theory. Gopnik and Meltzoff maintain that this sequence should also take place in cognitive development. Children systematically strive to apply their intuitive theories to a wide range of situations. Their aim for consistency, though, occasionally blinds them to the facts. Sticking to the central ideas of their intuitive theories, the children—at least for a certain time— resist counter-evidence. Most of the “theory” accounts of cognitive development work with an idea of “scientific theory” which should represent something like the least common denominator of the widely differing “theory” conceptions to be found in philosophy and history of science. Yet a couple of the features taken as defining criteria for theories by developmental psychologists are adopted from the so-called “standard view” of scientific theories as propounded by authors such as R. Carnap or C. G. Hempel (Suppe 1977). Examples of takeovers from this tradition are the emphasis on the dichotomy

INTRODUCTION

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between empirical evidence and theoretical constructs, or the idea that theoretical coherence results from lawful interrelations among theoretical concepts. Another source of inspiration for the “theory theory” is the work of the “undogmatic” empiricist W.V.O. Quine. Susan Carey’s idea that concepts should be identified with the roles they play in theories (Carey 1985; 1991) undoubtedly embraces Quine’s semantic holism, but couches it in a cognitivist vocabulary. Gopnik and Meltzoff themselves underscore the extent to which their concept of knowledge was shaped by the Quinean idea that our beliefs form an interconnected field which touches experience at its margins (Quine, 1951). Endorsing the Quinean tenet of theoretical underdetermination, Gopnik and Meltzoff reject the view that experience alone might uniquely determine theory choice. How then does the scientist cope with the immense range of possible hypotheses that are compatible with the available evidence? Gopnik and Meltzoff advance an evolutionary explanation: “There are constraints on the kinds of theories human minds will construct, given a particular pattern of input. We can think of these constraints as embodying implicit assumptions about the way the world works. The truth of these assumptions is, in some way, guaranteed by evolution” (Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997, 216). Humankind—scientists and children included—is built so as to get things right. The philosophical orientation of the theory theorists, however, raises problems for a psychological and historical analysis, as neither the “standard view” of theories nor Quine’s picture of a web of statements intend to provide a realistic, i.e. a psychologically valid account of scientific thinking. The “standard view” of theories was an outgrowth of the positivist “rational reconstruction,” the epistemological and at least partially normative analysis of scientific knowledge. Presupposing a rigid distinction between “context of discovery” and “context of justification,” the logical positivists could push the examination of actual scientific thinking into the somewhat dingy corner of discovery, which they left to psychologists or sociologists. Quine’s (1951) picture of a web of belief, on the other hand, provides at most a framework for an empirical study of knowledge and its change, but is far from settling the question of how scientists, ordinary people, or children conceive the world and how changes in these conceptions occur. Hence, neither the “standard view” of theories nor Quine’s work on the relation between semantics and knowledge were aimed at the individual scientist’s representational mechanisms or at the cognitive strategies used in tackling particular problems. Both were epistemological accounts that did not address the question of what “theorizing” looks like at the level of the individual scientist. That is why the criteria by which “theories” are defined in the “theory” accounts of cognitive development— coherence, dichotomy between theory and evidence, explanatory and predictive functions—seem to vacillate between the psychological and the normative, with the latter providing an explication of theories from an epistemological perspective rather than a valid psychological analysis.

16 The drawbacks of the “theory” accounts become evident when one considers Gruber’s thick description of the discovery process. At first glance, the idea of scientific discovery as a sequence of theories seems to capture Gruber’s case studies of Darwin’s theoretical development quite well. As can be seen in Figure 1 (p.129), Gruber describes the changes in Darwin’s thinking between 1832 and 1838 as a sequence of stages in an increasingly complex belief system. Reading Gruber’s reconstruction more carefully though, one notices multiple aspects of Darwin’s thinking during that time which, albeit playing major parts in the construction of the theory of evolution, are missed in the picture of scientific thinking presented by the “theory theorists.” We see a young Darwin who skillfully used ambiguities to explore alternative pathways of thinking. We learn that between 1835 and 1837, Darwin created a peculiar style of thought which allowed him to push ideas to their limits. As the Red Notebook reveals, Darwin, in this period, tended to focus on extreme scales, both on the very small and the very great. By steadily making out possible great effects of accumulated small events he was able to relate both extremes. In The Emergence of a Sense of Purpose (p.123-144) and in Going the Limit (p.145-166), Gruber describes several thoughtforms that Darwin developed at that time. One of them is the equilibration model which holds that every natural phenomenon tends to oscillate around some value. When the deviation is too great, a regulating process re-establishes equilibrium. Another form of thought that Darwin utilized was to situate every particular phenomenon within the whole range of processes belonging to the domain at issue. Recurring to a concept from the cognitive sciences, thought forms and thinking styles of this kind could be regarded as heuristics operating in the discovery process. Gruber emphasizes repeatedly that the experience Darwin gained during the Beagle voyage was far from sufficient to account for his intellectual development leading to the theory of evolution. So Darwin too faced theoretical underdetermination. Gruber stresses that between 1832 and 1838, during the phase of theory construction, “Darwin seems to be moving in a direction, making a set of choices, constructing a point of view and applying it over a whole range of phenomena” (p.154). It seems that Darwin found his way of dealing with underdetermination. Yet instead of crediting evolutionary constraints with this accomplishment, Gruber’s analysis displays the multiple origins of Darwin’s “constraints on theory building”: Part of them are due to the “shared knowledge” which Darwin took over from family traditions as well as from the “historical currents to which he was exposed” (p.164)—Lyell’s Principles is a case in point here. But partly the “sense of direction” guiding Darwin’s theoretical development during 1832 and 1838 arose from the particular style of thinking which Darwin created at that time. In the papers on Darwin included in this volume, Gruber unfolds the multiple facets of this “style of thinking”: Darwin’s various “thoughtforms,” his preference for going to extremes, the way he fruitfully used ambiguities, the metaphors he was working on etc. Perhaps the strongest tenet of the “theory theory” is the assumption that the psychological processes operative in children’s cognitive development are identical to those underlying theory change in science. Gruber’s account of creative development

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casts doubt on this claim. Gruber depicts creative growth as a purposeful process guided not only by the “sense of direction” but also by the creator’s “sense of the self.” This idea does not mean that the creator is a self-absorbed narcissist. “Sense of self” refers, rather, to the artist’s or the scientist’s commitment to his chosen task: to his goals and to a realistic estimate of his resources. Whether cognitive development in childhood can be described as a purposeful process in this sense is doubtful. Certainly, one might find forms of self-regulated cognitive development in adolescence, a phase during which the person builds up the first high-level commitments and longranging interests. But describing cognitive development in early and middle childhood as a purposeful self-regulated process in Gruber’s sense would be inappropriate. During this phase, “child development moves the individual toward pre-existing norms” (p.350)—either by Piagetian autoregulative mechanisms, by enculturation or, following the recent theories on infant cognition, by innate constraints. Is thus the main conclusion to be drawn from Gruber’s account of scientific discovery that historians of science and developmental psychologists work in separate fields which should be kept distinct? Should we thus bolster the disciplinary boundary between history of science and psychology instead of rendering it more penetrable? The opposite is true. Gruber’s case studies are genuine psychological analyses of long-term processes of thinking and are developmental in orientation. Instead of merely providing intuitive narrative accounts of developing ideas, Gruber describes the cognitive structures and mechanisms, i.e. the tools used in scientific thinking, and thus offers in-depth analyses of creative development. But in contrast to many models developed in cognitive science laboratories, Gruber’s studies take the cultural and historical determinants of scientific thinking into consideration. Cultural and historical determinants do not simply include some distant factors of influence, but instead refer to the knowledge structures available in a given culture. Gruber shows how the knowledge of an individual partakes in the currents of the social knowledge available at a certain time, and points out how the development of an individual can be situated within a cultural system of knowledge. Gruber’s case studies thus demonstrate that both historical analysis and psychology are indispensable in understanding creative development.

Berlin, August 2004

Katja Bödeker

INTRODUCTION

The mind of man is framed Even like the breath and harmony of music: There is a dark invisible workmanship That reconciled discordant elements And makes them move in one society —William Wordsworth, The Prelude

A LIFE WITH A PURPOSE

The process of science entails a paradox. On the one hand, the scientist must develop and nurture a point of view that facilitates and encourages the discovery of novelty. On the other hand, this point of view, while assimilating the new, must also be stable enough to preserve its own direction and continuity. In going through Darwin’s notebooks, I could see both sides of this paradox played out, sometimes in the same passage. Scientific thinking, even in its most exhilarating moments, is a highly organized process. It builds upon a framework that orients and directs but also confines the scientist’s intellectual activities. Noticing relations between facts or events entails a new perspective and a point of view. Formerly unrecognized evidence, for instance, must be incorporated into the existing structures of thought. Openness to the new, therefore, rather than representing a general and limitless habitude, depends on the nature of the structural configuration at a certain point in time. Thus, on the one hand, the existing structure protects itself from elements that might lead to a structural change and, on the other hand, is subject to the compelling attraction of novel information. Such new material may provoke intriguing thoughts, digressions, and deep immersion, thus jeopardizing the continuity and integrity of the scientist’s original endeavors. In order to preserve coherence and direction, the scientist must step back and examine the new material as part of his long-term undertaking. It seems obvious that the history of science provides an excellent, perhaps the best, source of materials for a psychological study of scientific thought. This inquiry might fruitfully integrate the two disciplines of psychology and the history of science. The goal of such an endeavor would be to link the reconstruction of the scientist’s intellectual work to some general assumptions about the development of thinking in its historical contexts. Unfortunately, neither the established methods of theory construction and hypothesis testing as they are practised and vehemently advocated in psychology, nor a merely biographical tracing of the life-course of the H. E. Gruber and K. Bödeker (eds.). Creativity, Psychology, and the History of Science, 19-34. © 2005 Springer.

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INTRODUCTION

creative scientist seem particularly suited to fostering such a synthesis between psychology and history (for a promising alternative see Gooding 1990; Hanson 1958; Kuhn, 1962). In psychology, there have been numerous studies of scientific thought, but few of them take a historical approach. Even a classic like Max Wertheimer’s Productive Thinking (1945) is an ahistorical treatment of its subject, treating as essentially the same two children playing badminton, a secretary thinking about her office, Galileo and Einstein thinking about physical problems. Such a monistic approach might plausibly have some value but it loses the vitality that historical inquiry must have. The prevalent convention of refraining from historical analysis and psychology exclusively focusing on processes may have acted as a hindrance to the study of scientific thought or scientific creativity. In their search for the general mental operations underlying creativity, cognitive psychologists are often at great pains to expunge meaning from the empirical investigation of thinking, presenting their subjects with content-free “stimuli” such as geometrical figures or trying to isolate the test material from the person’s actual field of knowledge. Even if the attempt is made not to detach thinking from its content, the focus of study is usually on the simple occurrence of creative ideas rather than on their structure or their position within the person’s broader framework of knowledge (for a good review of experimental research in this tradition see Runco and Sakamoto 1999). Psychometric studies addressing the relation between personality and scientific work also suffer from a similar absence of real content. In order to demonstrate statistically how personality might affect creative achievement, large samples of subjects are needed—a requirement that will inevitably downgrade the criterion level on which creative individuals are chosen. Furthermore, the study of large numbers of subjects, together with the high level of abstraction that it dictates, will force the investigator to disregard the very specialized skills and knowledge that may represent the bedrock of the individual’s creativity. Psychometric research of scientific creativity thus aims at very general conclusions (e.g. that creative scientists tend to be more ambitious), behind which the content and inner structure of the individuals’ particular work disappears (see Plucker and Renzulli (1999) for a good review of research in this tradition). The investigator of creativity seems, almost inevitably, to pass through a phase of constructing a system of categories, e.g. Preparation-Incubation-Illumination-Verification (Wallas 1926); Person-Process-Product (Stein 1968); Field-Domain-Person (Csikszentmihalyi 1988a, 1996). My humble contribution to this categorizing is to emphasize that three features found in extraordinarily creative people—KnowledgePurpose-Affect—are essential for understanding the development of creative work. Certainly the making of categories and, more generally, taxonomic behavior is part of doing science. But categorizing is not enough, especially if it entails neglecting the processes that give rise to the categories. As Darwin put it, in discussing a similar methodological point, we have to go beyond “the mere putting together and separating objects more or less alike” (Darwin 1859, 420).

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A fundamental premise of the evolving systems approach—our approach to the study of creative work, which is represented in the first section of this book—is that every creator is unique and is so in just those ways that are essential for the particular tasks confronting him or her. These are often tasks that owe their origin and urgency to the efforts of the creator in question. Such a perspective makes it useless, not to say harmful and misleading, only to search for general laws governing creative work while neglecting each individual creator’s efforts. For example, let us consider, or reconsider, the often-cited case of Kekulé’s discovery of the benzene ring in a reverie of the dance of atoms (for a challenging and skeptical account of this story see Wotiz 1993). As Kekulé told the story much later in his life, it is a classic case of an apparently involuntary sudden insight occurring during a hypnagogic reverie, an episode largely devoid of conscious intent, careful planning, rational thought, or collaborative work. Yet it is exactly these characteristics that are the salient elements in the tale, elements that only become apparent through detailed study of the whole case. Without a body of such studies there is little merit in counting up numbers of occurrences of sudden insight. But what does even “a body of such studies” provide? Only at a rather lofty level of abstraction can we say that Darwin’s sketches of the irregularly branching tree of nature have something in common with Kekulé’s reverie of the dance of the atoms. And to attain the necessary level in our own thinking we need in-depth studies of both Darwin and Kekulé, one a biologist, the other a chemist, together with a conceptual exploration of imagery in scientific thought. Following a line of thought similar to mine, Arthur Miller has, in one telling page, expressed his doubts as to the legitimacy of lumping together insights that occur within very different lines of thought. (For more on this, see Gruber 1995b; Miller 1984). Thoughts such as these led my collaborators and me to our heavy reliance on the case study method as the appropriate road to travel. A cognitive case study in scientific thinking can be seen as an attempt to synthesize the analysis of the processes of thought with the reconstruction of its content. In scrutinizing the individual’s cognitive organization as a whole, studies of the development of single scientists try to shed light on the inner workings of creative minds. In our search for the appropriate level of analysis, we have found it useful to avoid choosing one favorite level as the “best.” A more fruitful approach is to single out several levels of analysis appropriate for the given case, and then strive to fit them together. Although my own studies of Darwin’s creative work did not explicitly aspire to this interplay of levels, to some extent the approach did work its way into Darwin on Man (1981e).

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INTRODUCTION LEITMOTIFS

Network of Enterprise Following Herbert Simon’s approach, explaining scientific creativity in terms of problem solving, cognitive studies of science are still prone to regard creative work as puzzle solving, as a mere cognitive striving to discover answers to already recognized questions. Implicit in this approach is the image of a problem or a task as an external situation that faces the scientist, as well as the idea of the solution as something that exists and is simply to be grasped. The description of scientific activity thus turns into a retracing of its search. Problem solving certainly is a vital constituent of scientific work, but it should be situated within the context of a larger set of cognitive processes which the individual must orchestrate. The most distinctive feature of the evolving systems approach is our emphasis on the idea that creative work is purposeful and that it takes time because it is in principle difficult, and almost always follows a meaningful but non-linear course. The creative person has many purposes; they vary in scope, in intensity, in immediacy, and in privacy. Activity is split up into many strands, the coordination and regulation of which is not given to the person but is to be constructed in the course of working and living. In order to depict this complex and long-term organization of work we have put forward the concept of a network of enterprise. This idea can be considered as one of the leitmotifs of our study—a recurrent theme disclosing the consistency underlying the considerable diversity of our projects and activities. We take an enterprise to be a set of projects and activities the creative person pursues for a long time, sometimes for decades. Due to its tendency to become self-perturbating, an enterprise hardly if ever comes to an end: When a goal is attained, the enterprise is likely to engender novel tasks and projects that continue it. The creative individual does not pursue only a single enterprise, but orchestrates and coordinates several, thereby constructing the network of enterprise. The network enables the creator to maintain parallel enterprises or to switch from one enterprise to another as the work demands. Over time, the form and content of the network may change. But far from representing a silent process of gradual modification, the change is actively initiated and controlled by the individual. The creative person possesses a repertoire of strategies that transform current patterns of activity, e.g. branching one enterprise into two or more or, inversely, merging several enterprises into one. If there are several enterprises in the network, they almost certainly are at different stages at any given time—a point that has been largely neglected. The network of enterprise is also a methodological tool for the researcher that provides a direct way of schematizing and describing the creative person’s entire set of intentions and endeavors. Our initial assumption was that such a network would simply give us a picture of the creator’s intentions as an array of projects organized in time, a sort of skeletal description of what the person had done, is doing, and plans to

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do in the future. But it has become apparent that the network of enterprise also reflects deeper motives and long standing commitments—ideological, intellectual, and aesthetic. The few sketches we provide are faithful to the modest goal of skeletal descriptions based on actual projects, each strand of the network representing a line of endeavor. The network as a whole stands for the creator’s oeuvre. This way of describing an oeuvre does not impinge upon or impair other approaches to motivation, such as the Zeigarnik effect (Zeigarnik 1927), which emphasizes task interruption as a dynamic force in the development of specific works, or Maslow’s need hierarchy (1966) situating particular lines of effort in the lifetime as a whole. Indeed, these ideas are often demonstrated within the network of enterprise. Zeigarnik’s experiments suggest how the creator becomes increasingly invested in the whys and wherefores of his or her own work. Although the creator’s ways of working may sometimes resemble other obsessive processes, it does not originate from pathology but from intense interest in the world and, occasionally, from efforts to change it. My approach may seem too rosy, especially as compared to approaches to creativity focusing on psychopathology. But this gulf between normal and abnormal is misleading. There is no reason to think they are mutually exclusive. Take Van Gogh, for example. Of course he suffered from some pathological condition. But this statement must be tempered. First, when he painted he was always lucid. Second, his famous letters to his brother Theo represent a very sane mind. Incidentally, he did not cut off his ear, he only mutilated it: not edifying, but a much less violent act than the one usually attributed to him. Furthermore, it may well be that Van Gogh’s illness was caused by his repeated exposure to the poisonous heavy metals used in making some pigments, not the dynamics usually implied by theories of psychopathology. The creative person’s network of enterprise makes a vital contribution to his or her sense of self: On waking after a sleep, personal consciousness is continuous. The purposeful creator immediately knows who he or she is and what must be done next. There are many ways to follow, but the creative person is not taking a random walk through these possibilities; deviations from the prevailing systems of belief must be explained or justified—and that work, we have found, takes time, much time. It is the pursuit of these enterprises that makes up a productive life so that if the inventory of unfinished tasks were ever to go to zero, the person would bend all his effort to replenish it. In reality, of course, such enterprises are hardly if ever exhausted. For clarification it should be added that there is no reason to assume a priori that a large network is more creative than a small one. This point applies to all the many ways that branching structures can vary or differ. There would be little point in collecting many such structures in the hope of correlating some variable of branching structures with some variable of the creative person or process. Indeed, that might defeat the purpose of the tree metaphor by diverting attention away from the effort to construct a model capturing the uniqueness of each creator. I still relive the thrill of discovery when I move my gaze upward from the diagram itself (See Figure 1.) to the caption Darwin gave it: “I think.”

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INTRODUCTION

Figure 1. Darwin’s early attempts to sketch the idea of the irregularly branching tree of nature (Reproduced from Gruber 1981e). Finally, each creator assembles the enterprises that form his or her tree. They are not invented and supplied by the investigator of the creative process. It is the creator who constructs and discovers the branches.

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Pluralism Over time, pluralism emerged as a conscious theme guiding my understanding of intentional creative work—a second leitmotif helping to give our work its identity. Coming into focus as the result of some recurring ideas in our creativity studies, the motif itself was foreshadowed in the scepticism concerning monistic accounts of thinking as it is apparent in my work on perception. The aim of these early studies, however, was not to prove the plurality of cognitive modalities, but rather to display the problems and requirements that arise from them. In order to scrutinize how continuity of thinking can be preserved in the face of this diversity of modalities, we began to explore transformations that integrate distinct cognitive events. One focus of our research on creativity is the issue of uniqueness, a theme which both constitutes an assumption concerning the shape of a creative life and an imperative about how to study it. Neither the progression of a fixed sequence of stages nor the unfolding of innate gifts provide an appropriate model to describe creative development. A creative life takes no standard course—there are many different paths to Mount Olympus. The creative process is intricate and multi-faceted. Every scientific effort opens up a number of potential pathways for future investigation; the individual must find ways of coping with the danger of vacillation and pseudo-growth. Yet the creator is not trying out this and that in cavalier fashion. Even with some or much time and space for play, the main acts in a creative process are purposeful, serious activity. Interesting change-making is neither haphazard nor linear. It is an orderly process of exploration, experimentation, and reflection directed towards keeping the individual on his course of productive achievement. The network of enterprise is in part a regulatory mechanism, giving the creative person a sense of direction and a vision of what he strives for. Again, neither the mere existence of multiple developmental pathways per se nor the various turns and twists of a creative life are the targets of our research on creativity, rather we wish to understand the requirements and adaptions which lead to this pluralism. I interpret my own and others’ studies of repetition and transformation not as revealing conservative moves, but as showing more clearly how creative change can be both orderly and innovative. For the investigator, pluralism is liberating because a single entity does not have to bear the weight of the whole. But plurality also means that more must be mastered, related disciplines must be accommodated and, so far as possible, the work of synthesis must go forward. When studying the creator’s work over time, it was clear that there was not one grand enterprise but several; not one ruling metaphor but an ensemble of metaphors; not one grand insight springing up in isolation from its context but a host of insights both expressing and guiding the sweep of the work.

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INTRODUCTION ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

The present book is a collection of my papers ranging over a period of some forty years, from 1959 to 1999. Although I am the main author of the papers in this book throughout most of the decades represented here, I have benefited profoundly from the collaboration of a shifting group of students and colleagues. The free use of “I” and “we” reflects this state of affairs. The collection has two main aims: First, we seek to bring out the mutually enriching relations between the history of science and the psychological study of thinking and thus try to foster and demonstrate the possibility of a synthesis of psychology and the study of the sciences—our research on creativity can be understood as an outgrowth of this endeavor. Second, the book is intended to illustrate my own efforts to combine a career as a working scientist with a career as a concerned citizen. Presenting our work as it evolved within a forty-year period, the book is not organized in a linear way, it shows no step-by-step development of a coherent ensemble of ideas. Such an arrangement would run counter to the picture of creative work that is propounded in the papers to follow. We compare creative work to a network of multiple strands that cross, merge, and branch in a unique and unpredictable way. The arrangement of this book is inspired by this network of enterprise idea. The book is divided into eight sections, each including articles representing one of the enterprises I pursued throughout my working life. I hope that this arrangement permits us to see one network of enterprise as a whole, while preserving the elements that compose it. This kind of arrangement implies that the book has no preset direction of study. The reader is not expected to proceed straight from cover to cover, but should cut her own path through the book and feel free to begin where her field of interest lies. Subsequently, she can follow the thematic lines running between the different sections. Thus, the reader’s path through the book won’t resemble a straight line, but more the branching tree of nature, i.e. the image that is so prominent in our account of creative development. As the collection does not conform to a unilinear unfolding of thoughts, some of our preeminent themes will emerge, slightly varied, in several thematic sections of the book. These recurrences uncover on the one hand the sub-surface connections running between our different fields of activity and on the other indicate the variations and modulations those themes undergo when transposed to various fields of application. The issue of the nature of thinking can be taken as one of those themes. It elucidates the continuity underlying the seemingly disparate strands of my work and thus integrates the different sections of this book. How much time does thinking take? Following their methodological credo to analyze and isolate mental events experimentally, cognitive psychologists, in their study of thinking, mostly concentrate on cognitive processes of a narrow temporal scope. So did I in my early experimental work, when I dealt, for example, with the cognitive underpinnings of causal impres-

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sions or perceptual organization. But obviously, cognitive events falling within the range of milliseconds form parts of larger sequences of thought that extend over weeks, months and even years. The thought process that I sought to trace in my cognitive case study of Darwin’s development of the theory of evolution can be conceived of as such an intricate long-term event. In our research on creative work we aim at cognitive processes on this broad timescale. One of the main results of our studies is an appreciation of how much time it takes to do creative work and an understanding of the requirements that it brings with it. In the pursuit of a cognitive long-term endeavor, the individual faces the danger of going astray. While deviating from a previously chosen path is necessary if the person is to exploit fully the surprises and new problems discovered, it is also important to develop regulatory capacities to keep such deviations within bounds. The network of enterprise and the sense of purpose provide the individual with a regulatory system to remain on the pathway to productive achievement. Both the creator and the investigator of creative work must have stamina: They must contend with different branches of knowledge, different styles of thought, and the different historical moments at which each drama of discovery is played out. A key problem in such an effort is to find ways of dealing with the elements without losing sight of our ultimate goals—to understand something about both the forest and the trees. Our work on the creative process, its development as well as the requirements that it entails is depicted in the first section of the book, The Creative Person as a Whole. The scientific concern for long-term processes of thinking could and should be pursued as a joint undertaking of two disciplines—with the history of science supplying the source material and cognitive psychology providing some general ideas about intellectual processes. When I began my case study of Darwin (some of the results of which can be found in the second section entitled The Man Who Started It All), I hoped to bring together both fields of inquiry to a fruitful new synthesis. However, I soon realized that this endeavor was extremely difficult. Besides the understanding of biology and geology that a study of Darwin’s notebooks necessitated, I found that neither the organization of psychology nor that of the history of science fostered such an interdisciplinary undertaking. Separated by a formidably high disciplinary wall, fragmentation and atomism dominated the scene. This picture has changed over the last twenty years as the result of a number of excellent case studies on the structure and the development of the creative process. But part of my original difficulties remain: The history of science and psychology represent, in organization and in culture, two distinct disciplines. In addition to their disciplinary boundaries, the degree of intradisciplinary specialization, at least in psychology, is very high. Every year, new research journals are established and new professional organizations are founded, representing the emergence of new fields of psychological research. Given that this disciplinary branching might demonstrate scientific vigor, it could ultimately turn the discipline into a conglomeration of small communities within each of which communication is intense but with hardly any scientific exchange among them. In

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INTRODUCTION

any case, this process of scientific splitting demands a high degree of specialization. Approximately at the level of advanced university training, the student normally encounters institutional and scientific constraints that force a narrowing of interests and pressure to find a place in one of the many sub-communities. Changes of scientific concern or a serious ambition to bring disciplines or even sub-disciplines together are not only difficult to pursue but might represent, from the point of view of the individual’s professional interests, a risky undertaking. Intradisciplinary organization as well as interdisciplinary frontiers thus may turn out to impede scientific innovations, which produce a rearrangement of the scientific landscape. The image of creative thinking portrayed in the first two sections of the book is that of a protracted non-linear process. To describe the creative process as non-linear, however, refers not only to the web of projects and enterprises, but to the temporal shape of creative thinking—an issue addressed in the papers of the third section, Facets of the Creative Process. Many models of the creative process make implicit assumptions about its temporal structure, the most prominent among them equating creative thinking with the occurrence of sudden insights: In this conception, insights occur like lightning bolts out of the blue and instantly re-arrange the individual’s mental structure. Wallas’ famous four-step model of creative thinking (preparation, incubation, illumination, verification), however, considers these Aha-experiences as stages in a long-term development and, taking a stance akin to ours, examines their position and function within this process. But unlike our approach, Wallas’ four-stage model is linear. The model also tends to conceal the protracted temporal structure of the creative process with its multiple temporal layers and nested levels. An insight, for instance, can be conceived as a temporal compression of extended thought processes or as a long-term development of thinking telescoped into a few seconds. Embracing this view of insight as a re-cognition of what one already almost knows, rather than an emergence of entirely new ideas, makes apparent that repetition, contrary to psychological folklore, forms a vital part of the creative process. In general, the role of repetition in the psychology of thinking is marginal at best, mostly mentioned as a correlation between frequency of repetition and adequacy of recall or simply as a destructive activity. In problem solving research, repetition is simply out of place. If a problem being solved is presented again, it will initiate a retrieval of the solution rather than a novel trial to work it out. Of course, nothing is ever repeated exactly. Repetitions generally give rise to slight variations of the performance of an action or even of its underlying organizing structure, thereby both consolidating and elaborating it. We therefore stress the constructive function of repetition. Following the temporal structure of thinking (the main topic of the third section), section 4, Modalities, is concerned with the stuff of experience, i.e. with different modes of representation and their interplay. Individuals have at their disposal a number of modalities of representation, e.g. systems of taxonomies, propositions etc., the interrelationships of these, however, as well as their role in the cognitive economy

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taken as a whole, are hardly understood. Imagery is one of the main issues to be addressed in this section. By now, imagery has turned into a prolific research field in psychology which, with the adoption of the new brain imaging techniques in the cognitive sciences, is even enlarging. Though covering a wide range of cognitive phenomena, the study of imagery deals predominantly with very concrete images, that can be conceived of as veritable residues of perceptual experiences—such as Galton’s breakfast table or your spouse’s face. In our work, however, we focus on a different aspect of imagery, namely the role of images of wide scope in creative thinking. Different from the quasi-perceptual objects of cognitive psychology, images of wide scope, in contributing to the generation and exploration of ideas, form an integral part of creative thinking. They are eminently flexible and generative, and like Darwin’s tree, can represent the multiple meanings, unexpected aspects, and relationships of an idea being unfolded. Images of wide scope are further mechanisms regulating the creative process. Due to its concern with long-term processes of thinking and their regulation, our work can be understood as falling within the range of developmental psychology. The different aspects of this relationship are to be explored in section 6 and 7, Tracking the Ordinary Course of Development and Coping With the Extraordinary. In our cognitive case studies we attempt to grasp an individual’s cognitive economy as a whole, and in order to do so, we have found it useful to think of the creative person’s thought as a set of developing structures. Thought evolves in structures: The person works with one such structure, elaborates it, recognizes its shortcomings and transforms it. Obviously, this way of conceptualizing the evolution of thinking is closely related to the work of Jean Piaget, with whom I worked for several years (see for example Piaget 1971 and Piaget and Garcia 1989). But in contrast to the scientific aims of genetic epistemology, with Piaget as its leading exponent, we are not trying to lay bare a kind of universal latent structure, a set of relationships of which the subject is not aware. Rather, we simply aim at reconstructing the ideas of the creative person in a way that he would probably recognize and appreciate as a reasonable interpretation. However, and this justifies our choice for the term structure, the individual’s ideas make up an intricate and dense network, in which every idea is implicated in innumerable others. Though addressing the long-term development of thought, our work is mainly concerned with high achieving adult individuals and thus differs in a further respect from Piagetian and post-Piagetian developmental psychology. This is one of the main points to be elaborated in Tracking the Ordinary Course of Development. Most theories of developmental psychology are unilinear. In their attempt to determine the stages or at least the main developmental landmarks that constitute ontogenesis, they aim to trace the unique developmental pathway that individuals generally follow. But when we turn to the development of creative thought, the picture necessarily gets more diverse. Nevertheless, the concept of a unilinear developmental trajectory continues to frame prevailing psychological research on creativity in significant respects. For example, models that take giftedness as a prerequisite for highly cre-

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INTRODUCTION

ative achievement, thus trying to predict or explain creative outcomes by gifts, are often committed to maintaining a standard course for a creative life: precocity in childhood, early commitment and achievement, single-minded pursuit of creative goals, and maybe late decline. The relation between giftedness and creativity is addressed in Coping With the Extraordinary. In the papers included in that section, we outline an approach to studying the relation of giftedness and creativity that begins from a different perspective. Instead of focusing on giftedness from its beginnings, we pursue a research strategy that takes unique adult performance as its starting point and works backward towards the processes and conditions that gave rise to it. It is the transformation of the gift into creative achievement, seen from its endpoint—adult performance— that we are concerned with: This means that we examine how the creator shaped himself to convert promising aptitudes into outstanding accomplishments. From this angle, it becomes clear that the stereotype of the life course of the creative person misconstrues the developmental peculiarities that creative work necessitates: Outstanding adult achievement does not often follow from the early appearance of cognitive abilities or from unusually rapid development. Rather it is associated with a deviation from the norm, one that might facilitate looking at matters in a new way and construing a point of view of one‘s own. Still, seeing things differently alone does not make up the creator. He also has to see himself as special and as capable of making significant contribution to his field. Such a concept of the self as an extraordinary person is not to be confused with hybris. The person striving for the extraordinary knows her own mission, and mobilizes her entire force to fulfil it. Moreover, she does not pursue it blindly: High goals are weighed up against personal and other resources and energies. Thus, the self-concept of the person sustaining creative work can be thought of as based on a sense of direction, enabling the individual to regulate the course of his own progress. That is what “self-construction of the extraordinary” amounts to: Creative development is no quasi-embryological unfolding of god-given gifts, but represents a goal-directed process that is shaped by the individual. CREATIVITY AND MORALITY We were brought up with certain ideas about beliefs and behavior. Not least among them is the idea that morality counts for something, that one’s behavior makes a difference, that one’s choice of occupation and preoccupation has some effect on the future of the world, or at least on one’s own family and loved ones. And then we get our training as scientists and social scientists. In one myth we learn that valid science is value free, so it’s morally good enough to keep your nose clean and your powder dry. We learn to husband our moral resources by deferring our deontic activities to future years, when we are less dependent on the academic establishment. The last two sections of the book, Creativity in the Moral Domain and

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Peace and Further Conditions for Human Welfare, document some of my attempts to reconcile my scientific work with a further strand of activity, i.e. with an enterprise that has different social-political roots than the others: a concern for world peace. After the American withdrawal from Vietnam, the peace movement ran out of steam. In my own case, I looked for other ways of continuing to express my social concerns. In effect, I re-invented a well-worn idea whose watchword is “creativity and morality.” For the most part researchers interested in morality had followed Piaget’s lead concentrating their work on the moral judgments of children and adolescents. I was more interested in adults and in action. Years earlier, very late in the American Psychological Association’s convention planning process for 1962, I had submitted a proposal for an anti-nuclear weapons symposium to be held in New York City that summer, under the auspices of the American Psychological Association and SPSSI—the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. The reply came back from the prominent social psychologist Hal Proshansky: deadline past—too late. Then, a few weeks later, he recontacted me. The organizing committee had just realized that the SPSSI program had nothing on the subject of war and peace. Would I please go ahead as proposed? The symposium was a great success. Hundreds attended and an account appeared on the front page of The New York Times. My opening remarks as chairman were reported in extenso and became the basis for my chapter in a book, Breakthrough to Peace, edited by the author and Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. This encouraged me to go further: In addition to helping to organize local events, in 1968, together with the ethologist Ethel Tobach, I was one of the organizers and first national chair of Psychologists for Social Action. Whatever direct value these activities may have had, we were also demonstrating anew to our colleagues that it is possible to be both a social activist and a regular scientist and scholar. I became deeply immersed in organizing Psychologists for Social Action—in 1968 my hotel room in San Francisco became its headquarters. At the same time I was giving an invited address to APA’s Division for the History of Psychology on the development of Charles Darwin’s thinking. After that APA meeting I found myself caught in a painful trap. I had three major projects going: on Darwin’s thinking, chair of Psychologists for Social Action, and a study of anti-Vietnam war resisters. It was too much for me, I had to drop something. After much soul-searching, I abandoned the war resisters. I planned to resume that work later on, but I never did, except for a few talks in local settings. Whenever I recall that decision, I feel regret and a little shame. Still, if I found myself in a similar dilemma tomorrow, I imagine I might make a similar choice: keep some, drop some, try to maintain a balance. My hope has long been to be effective in both the cognitive and the moral arenas. But I did not set out with any preconceived ideas about integrating the two. When I joined the American Psychological Association in 1950, just after getting my Ph.D. at Cornell University, I described my professional interests as “perception, thinking, group processes”—the first describing my then-current passion and my dissertation;

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INTRODUCTION

the second naming my intended move into a new field of research; and the third a sort of private code word for a vague conviction that I ought, as a good citizen, some day do something good, both for psychology and for society. By 1966, the list of my interests had mutated to “perception, thinking, and history of science.” While I had thus been mutating in my purposes, my profession had been doing likewise. Specialized division upon division had been added to the rolls. During my half-century of membership in APA, the number of its divisions has nearly tripled. The process of institutional fission seems to be well-nigh ceaseless, perhaps varying in rate from discipline to discipline and from country to country. It may be that this is creative in a fashion not unlike the branching of the networks of enterprise of individual scientists. Institutional fission may be vital to ensure the constant rejuvenation of social vision, creating ways to incorporate not only those already powerful but also those struggling. EXPERIMENTAL, SOCIAL, AND HISTORICAL TRUTHS It was 1942 or 1943, social psychology had not yet displayed the bewildering transmutations that ordinary college students can undergo and testimony of the severity of life and death in the Nazi concentration camps had not been given wide circulation. In short, it was possible for an honest academic to believe that, when pushed to the limit, ordinary people would behave decently. At that time Solomon Asch, the distinguished social psychologist, was my teacher at Brooklyn College, where I was to earn my first degree. He believed and wanted to believe in the ineradicable decency and honesty of ordinary people. He created the first rigged jury experiments in which a bona fide subject was confronted with a panel of peers. These jury members had been carefully coached to lie about something petty and the subject would find him or herself in disagreement with the majority. The judgments to be made were about a banal matter—the relative lengths of lines in a situation where ordinarily every one would agree (Asch 1956). But what was really at stake was the presumption of the reliability of the perceptual judgments of ordinary people. Asch believed and wanted to believe that people would not, in these circumstances, yield to group pressures. And that is how the first results came out, as I learned in a joyful conversation with one of my fellow students (I was in military training by that time). Asch’s optimism and the decency of ordinary people were vindicated. Then we began to see the whole story. In time there were four major findings that undermined Asch’s optimism—three experimental results and one vast array of historical fact. • The Zimbardo experiment which showed that ordinary university students could be made to take on the brutal attitudes and behavior of professional prison guards, without intensive or prolonged training or any previous experience of hostility between guards and prisoners (Zimbardo 1972).

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• Milgram’s experiments in which ordinary university students were persuaded to administer electric shocks to other students, including shocks they believed were dangerously close to lethal (Milgram 1974). • Asch’s own continuing experiments which showed that ordinary university students could be persuaded to accept and propagate judgments that were patently untrue (about the length of lines). Only about one fifth of subjects remained completely independent of group pressure, a much smaller number than had been anticipated by Asch. Then, the full truth emerged of how ordinary people could be brutalized to perform unspeakable acts under National Socialism before and during World War II. The matter was laid more or less to rest for that moment in the history of science, yet Asch’s initial results remained as a bone in my throat. Various escape clauses were considered, but Asch and his cohort—including me—had to change or withdraw from this issue. In the main, my colleagues and I took truth-seeking and truth-telling for granted. Now we came to see that truth had to be striven for, constructed and nourished.1 It was not until I got my second teaching post at the New School for Social Research, that I conceived of the Shadow Box experiment. The issue was no longer whether people yielded or not, the issue became how people go about cooperating with each other in deciphering a situation where they are seeing the same thing but from different vantage points—i.e. the two viewing stations of the Shadow Box. It is of some interest that the Shadow Box experiments were first conceived of in a quasi-political sense. Only later did it become apparent that the question of point of view pervades all situations of judgment from the purely perceptual to the preeminently social. Thus, for me, the universe of psychological and scientific discourse shifted irrevocably to one which must accommodate experimental, social and historical truths.

HOWARD GRUBER

1. This perspective is well expressed in the title of one of Donald Campbell’s papers: “Asch’s moral epistemology for socially shared knowledge” (Campbell 1990).

CHAPTER 1

THE CREATIVE PERSON AS A WHOLE

The Evolving Systems Approach to the Study of Creative Work

The evolving systems approach grew out of my case study of Darwin. In one sense it was a byproduct of this long-term effort but it also provided the key to answering the questions which initiated the Darwin project: how long does complex thinking take and how does it develop? The Darwin case study began with little more than the aim of tracing the thinking of a creative person over a long period of time. This in itself, however, provided a fresh perspective on the study of creativity, aiming less at its remote antecedents in the creator’s infancy, childhood, or biological equipment, and focusing instead on the person’s cognitive structures and their changes over time. Thus, the primary underlying question of the approach is how rather than why creative achievements emerge. The first paper in this section highlights this point. This focus of the evolving systems approach imposes demands upon the psychologist that cannot be met by the conventional tools of psychology. Examining the belief-systems of someone else, their growth and transformation, requires familiarity with that person’s field of activity—in Darwin’s case biology and geology. Such a demand cannot always be met. I had already run up against this problem. Before selecting Darwin for study, I had been considering a case study of Faraday, whose voluminous notebooks provide excellent source material. But I gave up this plan because I felt that my knowledge of physics and chemistry was insufficient for the task. A key methodological idea that distinguishes the case study is that each creative person is unique. This runs counter to the way psychologists are trained to think about the individual. Psychometric measurement of creativity assigns subjects to positions on one or more trait dimensions. These positions, however, do not represent actual analyses of a creative case, they are simply deviations from means—individuality is thus explicated as a set of interindividual differences. Experimental psychologists, on the other hand, have learned to disregard individual differences altogether in favor of general trends, but if individual differences are too great, the mean can become meaningless. This bothered me. My earliest empirical work in psychology included experiments in space orientation, which I pursued as an undergraduate in