Transformational Creativity in Science: A Graphical Theory
This work addresses the challenge of understanding paradigm shifts in science for researchers in creativity and philosophy of science, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theories without introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling transformational scientific creativity by developing a graphical theory that synthesizes Boden's and Kuhn's ideas, proving that modifications to axioms have the most transformative potential and illustrating this with historical examples.
Creative processes are typically divided into three types: combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational. Here, we provide a graphical theory of transformational scientific creativity, synthesizing Boden's insight that transformational creativity arises from changes in the "enabling constraints" of a conceptual space and Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions as resulting from paradigm shifts. We prove that modifications made to axioms of our graphical model have the most transformative potential and then illustrate how several historical instances of transformational creativity can be captured by our framework.