Review of An Interaction: Creativity, Cognition and Knowledge, Terry Dartnall (Ed.); Praeger, London, 2002, 337 pages

In common parlance, creativity is understood as an extraordinary ability, with which only few are gifted. However, the book ‘An Interaction: Creativity, Cognition and Knowledge’ emphasizes the idea that creativity can be better understood as common cognitive phenomena. It poses a challenge to our understanding of the knowledge and performance of our cognitive systems. Drawing on the theoretical and methodological dynamism of psychology, computer science and artificial intelligence, this volume explores the current and potential advances in the psychological understanding of creativity, cognition and knowledge and their intricate connection with each other. The insights the book proposes are bound to have implications for the current status of cognitive science. The book author holds that an account of creativity is the ultimate test for cognitive science. A system is said to be creative if it can articulate its domain-specific skills to itself as structures that it can reflect upon and change. Such an account will provide an explanation of how our creative products emerge, not out of combination of elements but out of our knowledge and ability. In the introduction, Dartnall vociferously argues that cognitive science is in need of a new epistemology that re-evaluates the role of representations in cognition, and accounts for the flexibility and fluidity of creative thought. He suggests that such an epistemology is already with us in some leading edge models of human creativity. This collection of papers by some of the leading figures in cognitive science is an endeavor in the same direction; they contribute scrupulously to Dartnall’s project of redefining epistemology by their elaborate discussions on various aspects of creativity as mundane creativity, representational re-description, analogical thinking, fluidity and dynamic binding, input vs output cre-