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- Volume 22, Issue, 2014
Pragmatics & Cognition - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2014
Volume 22, Issue 1, 2014
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The importance of chance and interactivity in creativity
Author(s): David Kirshpp.: 5–26 (22)More LessIndividual creativity is standardly treated as an ‘internalist’ process occurring solely in the head. An alternative, more interactionist view is presented here, where working with objects, media and other external things is seen as a fundamental component of creative thought. The value of chance interaction and chance cueing — practices widely used in the creative arts — is explored briefly in an account of the creative method of choreographer Wayne McGregor and then more narrowly in an experimental study that compared performance on a Scrabble-like word discovery problem. Subjects were presented with seven letters and given two minutes to call out three-to-seven-letter English words. There were three conditions: The tiles were fixed in place, subjects were free to move the tiles manually or the tiles could be randomly shuffled. Results showed that random shuffling was best, with manual movement second. Three reasons are provided: Shuffling is faster and cheaper than mentally thinking of candidates; randomizing strings covers the search space better than a deterministic method based on past successes; and randomizing is equivalent to adding diversity to a team, which is known empirically to lead to more creative solutions.
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Insight, interactivity and materiality
Author(s): Frederic Vallee-Tourangeaupp.: 27–44 (18)More LessThe popular iconography of insight casts a thinker as he or she uncoils from a Rodin pose and a bulb that lights a world hitherto hidden. By and large, these features of folk mythology capture and guide how psychologists conduct research on insight: Mental processes — some of which may be unconscious — transform an inceptive abstract representation of the world until it prescribes a fruitful solution to a problem. Yet thinking and problem solving outside the laboratory involve interacting with external resources, and through this interactivity with a material world, solutions are distilled. Still, laboratory work on problem solving pays scant and largely indifferent attention to interactivity: Sometimes problems are presented as riddles or static graphical or diagrammatic images, or sometimes they are accompanied by artefacts that can be manipulated (and sometimes interactivity is possible for some problems but not others within a set of problems over which performance is indiscriminately amalgamated). The research methodology — and indifference to the central role of interactivity in thinking — follows from a deep-seated commitment to mentalism and methodological individualism. However, a thinker is an embodied creature embedded in a physical world: The materiality of external resources and artefacts through which problems manifest themselves inevitably determines a set of action affordances. From a systemic perspective, thinking is traceable along a contingent spatio-temporal itinerary wrought by interactivity and evidenced by changes in the world.
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Technical cognition, working memory and creativity
Author(s): Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidgepp.: 45–63 (19)More LessThis essay explores the nature and neurological basis of creativity in technical production. After presenting a model of expert technical cognition based in cognitive anthropology and cognitive psychology, the authors propose that craft production has three inherent sources of novelty — procedural drift, serendipitous error and fiddling. However, these are quite limited in their creative potential, which may help explain the virtual absence of innovation over the long millennia of the Palaeolithic. Innovation can be far more rapid and effective via invention, which requires folk theories of causation and adequate working memory capacity, all fairly recent evolutionary developments. The neurological basis of expert technical cognition lies in well-known cortical and sub-cortical structures, but recent research has established a provocative role for the cerebellum in the formulation of novel arrangements.
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A developmental approach to ancient innovation: The potter’s wheel in the Bronze Age east Mediterranean
Author(s): Carl Knappett and Sander van der Leeuwpp.: 64–92 (29)More LessIn this paper, we view creativity through the lens of innovation, a concept familiar to archaeologists across a range of contexts and theoretical perspectives. Most attempts to understand ancient innovation thus far, we argue, have been limited by their lack of capacity to cope with the multiple scales of innovation: Those that track widespread changes, like the beginnings of metallurgy, fail to account for the changes experiences by individual craftspeople; those that do justice to the details of the micro-scale, with ‘thick’ description, cannot well explain the regional adoption of new practices. Here we develop an intermediary position, at the meso-scale, which we hope can serve to integrate these different scales. It is based on the notions that all innovation entails learning (and hence cognitive transformations) and that learning is very often supported at this meso-scale, through ‘communities of practice’. Drawing on the ethno-archaeological literature in particular, we emphasise how learning is a process of embodied cognition. Our archaeological case study is then drawn from the Bronze Age east Mediterranean, where a striking innovation in pottery making — the use of rotative kinetic energy via the potter’s wheel — sees a very uneven uptake from region to region over the course of many centuries. We propose certain differences in community organization from one region to another that might account for such variation in the adoption of an innovation, with the island of Crete in particular seeing a much more stable trajectory of adoption than many of its neighbouring areas.
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Cognitive landscapes: The origins of the English village
Author(s): Chris Gosdenpp.: 93–108 (16)More LessHuman engagements with the world form the basis for their intelligent understanding of it. Such material engagements are not piecemeal but follow some broad set of regularities as activities in one area of life are picked up and developed in another. Sweeping changes in life processes, which we might see as bursts of creativity, occur across areas of life we might label as secular or pragmatic and the sacred, calling into question such distinctions. In this paper, I follow the case of the emergence of the early medieval village and parish in England from around AD 750 onwards to examine how new cognitive landscapes emerge and what their entailments are more generally. I conclude by looking at the links between material engagement, identity and novelty.
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Different types of creativity on the two sides of shutters
Author(s): Maurice Blochpp.: 109–123 (15)More LessA charitable sale housed in the Paris showrooms of Christie’s displayed works created by European artists. These were painted over or on the backs of specially commissioned carved house shutters typical of the Zafimaniry region of Madagascar. The present article considers and contrasts the two types of creativity juxtaposed at the Christie’s sale. The European work stresses the artist’s individual originality and social isolation from the everyday lives of those who come to admire or buy the works. The process of the art’s production ends abruptly at the moment of exhibition and sale. In contrast, the work of the Malagasy carvers is contained within a general concern of continuing the life and growth of their families. Their art intends to harden and beautify the houses that represent the continuation of the families’ life. There is no disconnection between the carver and those who will see and use the shutters similar to that of the European artists, and there is no clear beginning or end to the process of creation similar to the point of exhibition and sale. The Malagasy carvers do not want to be different from their predecessors; they want to continue the work and lives of those they are in contact with.
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The creativity of undergoing
Author(s): Timothy Ingoldpp.: 124–139 (16)More LessCreativity is often portrayed as an X-factor that accounts for the spontaneous generation of the absolutely new. Yet the obsession with novelty implies a focus on final products and a retrospective attribution of their forms to unprecedented ideas in the minds of individuals, at the expense of any recognition of the form-generating potentials of the relations and processes in which persons and things are made and grown. In these processes, practitioners are characteristically called upon to copy the works of past masters. However, though they may be guided by a script or score, every practitioner has to improvise his or her own passage through the array of tasks the performance entails. With examples from music, calligraphy and lace-making, I show that the wellsprings of creativity lie not inside people’s heads, but in their attending upon a world in formation. In this kind of creativity, undergone rather than done, imagination is not so much the capacity to come up with new ideas as the aspirational impulse of a life that is not just lived but led. But where it leads is not yet given. In opening to the unknown — in exposure — imagination leads not by mastery but by submission. Thus the creativity of undergoing, of action without agency, is that of life itself.
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Creative thinging: The feeling of and for clay
Author(s): Lambros Malafourispp.: 140–158 (19)More LessHumans are organisms of a creative sort. We make new things that scaffold the ecology of our minds, shape the boundaries of our thinking and form new ways to engage and make sense of the world. That is, we are creative ‘thingers’. This paper adopts the perspective of Material Engagement Theory (Malafouris 2013) and introduces the notion ‘thinging’ to articulate and draw attention to the kind of cognitive life instantiated in acts of thinking and feeling with, through and about things. I will focus more specifically on Creative thinging, or creative material engagement, exploring the importance of thinging for understanding our species unique capacity for inventiveness.
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Creating practical cyborgs
Author(s): Kevin Warwickpp.: 159–181 (23)More LessIn this paper we consider the creative realisation of new beings — namely, cyborgs. These can be brought about in a number of ways, and several versions are discussed. A key feature is merging biological and technological sections into an overall living operational whole. A practical look is taken at how the use of implant and electrode technology can be employed to open up new paths between humans/animals and technology, especially linking the brain directly with external entities. Actual experimentation in each of the different cyborg forms perhaps defines the paper’s contents more than anything else. Considered are RFID implants, magnet implants, deep brain stimulation, Braingate implants and growing biological brains in robot bodies.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 31 (2024)
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Volume 30 (2023)
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Volume 29 (2022)
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Volume 28 (2021)
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Volume 27 (2020)
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Volume 26 (2019)
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Volume 25 (2018)
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Volume 24 (2017)
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Volume 23 (2016)
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Volume 22 (2014)
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Volume 21 (2013)
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Volume 20 (2012)
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Volume 19 (2011)
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Volume 18 (2010)
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Volume 17 (2009)
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Volume 16 (2008)
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Volume 15 (2007)
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Volume 14 (2006)
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Volume 13 (2005)
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Volume 12 (2004)
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Volume 11 (2003)
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Volume 10 (2002)
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Volume 9 (2001)
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Volume 8 (2000)
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Volume 7 (1999)
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Volume 6 (1998)
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Volume 5 (1997)
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Volume 4 (1996)
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Volume 3 (1995)
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Volume 2 (1994)
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Volume 1 (1993)
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