How Creative Ideas Take Shape

According to the honing theory of creativity, creative thought works not on individually considered, discrete, predefined representations but on a contextually-elicited amalgam of items which exist in a state of potentiality and may not be readily separable. This leads to the prediction that analogy making proceeds not by mapping correspondences from candidate sources to target, as predicted by the structure mapping theory of analogy, but by weeding out non-correspondences, thereby whittling away at potentiality. Participants were given an analogy problem, interrupted before they had time to solve it, and asked to write down what they had by way of a solution. Naïve judges categorized responses as significantly more supportive of the predictions of honing theory than those of structure mapping. Creative people often work on a task for a long time before they have insight into how to solve or go about the task, and even if insight occurs it can still take time for the idea can to mature. It is widely assumed that the creative process involves searching through memory and/or selecting amongst a set of predefined candidate ideas. For example, computer scientists have modeled the creative process as heuristic search through a ‘state space', a bunch of predefined possibilities. Most well known psychological theories of creativity (such as the Geneplore and the Darwinian theory) involve two stages: divergent generation of possibilities, followed by exploration and ultimately selective retention of the most promising of them. In psychological theorizing about creativity there is much discussion of the role of divergent thinking in creativity. Divergent thinking is presumed to involve the generation of multiple, often unconventional possibilities. Thus construed, it necessarily goes hand-in-hand with selection, since if you come up with multiple alternatives you eventually weed some of them out. However, the generation stage of creative thinking may be divergent not in the sense that it moves in multiple directions or generates multiple possibilities, but in the sense that it produces a raw idea that is vague or unfocused, that requires further processing to become viable. Similarly, the exploration stage of creative thinking may be convergent not in the sense that it entails selecting from amongst alternatives but in the sense that it entails considering a vague idea from different perspectives until it comes into focus. Thus, the terms divergent and convergent may be applicable to creative thought not in the sense of going from one to many or from many to one, but in the sense of going from well-defined to ill-defined, and vice versa. Although a creative process may involve search or selection amongst multiple possibilities, it need not, and neither search nor selection need figure prominently in a general theory of creativity. These are two very different views of creativity; indeed It has been shown