From Something Old to Something New: Functionalist Lessons for the Cognitive Science of Scientific Creativity

Abstract

An intuitive view is that creativity involves bringing together what is already known and familiar in a way that produces something new. In cognitive science, this intuition is typically formalized in terms of computational processes that combine or associate internally represented information. From this computationalist perspective, it is hard to imagine how non-representational approaches in embodied cognitive science could shed light on creativity, especially when it comes to abstract conceptual reasoning of the kind scientists so often engage in. The present article offers an entry point to addressing this challenge. The scientific project of embodied cognitive science is a continuation of work in the functionalist tradition in psychology developed over a century ago by William James and John Dewey, among others. The focus here is on how functionalist views on the nature of mind, thought, and experience offer an alternative starting point for cognitive science in general, and for the cognitive science of scientific creativity in particular. The result may seem paradoxical. On the one hand, the article claims that the functionalist conceptual framework motivates rejecting mainstream cognitive views of creativity as the combination or association of ideas. On the other hand, however, the strategy adopted here—namely, revisiting ideas from functionalist psychology to inform current scientific theorizing—can itself be described as a process of arriving at new, creative ideas from combinations of old ones. As is shown here, a proper understanding of cognition in light of the functionalist tradition resolves the seeming tension between these two claims.

The strong program in embodied cognitive science

“…For instance, traditional cognitivist research described by Thagard (2012) accounts for scientific innovation in terms of the combination of mental representations and it accounts for problem solving in terms of the creation, adaptation and use of mental models. In questions such as these, embodied cognitive scientists might be in a position to offer alternatives that rectify the disembodied nature of these accounts, but we may also find that a complete overhaul is called for because the phenomena need to be more fundamentally reframed (see Sanches de Oliveira, 2022).…”