Creativity in Science: Chance, Logic, Genius, and Zeitgeist

by Dean Keith Simonton

Where do major scientific breakthroughs come from? Do they arise from the logic of the scientific method, or do they result from flashes of genius? Are they the products of some mysterious zeitgeist, or spirit of the times, or do they emerge from chance or serendipity? Dean Simonton provides an answer, not by choosing one explanation and ignoring the others, but rather by unifying all four perspectives into a single theory in which chance plays the primary role, but with the significant involvement of logic, genius and zeitgeist.

Genres: Science, Psychology, Nonfiction

234 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Renowned for his groundbreaking contributions to the study of genius, Dean Keith Simonton has provided his expertise to over 400 publications on the topic, including a dozen books entitled Genius, Creativity, and Leadership; Scientific Genius; Greatness; Genius and Creativity; Origins of Genius; Great Psychologists and Their Times; Creativity in Science; and Genius 101.

The recipient of several awards, Simonton’s work has been recognized by the William James Book Award, the Sir Francis Galton Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Study of Creativity, the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Achievement in Psychology and the Arts, the Theoretical Innovation Prize in Personality and Social Psychology, the George A. Miller Outstanding Article Award, the E. Paul Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children, and the Robert S. Daniel Award for Four-Year College/University Teaching.

A fellow of several professional organizations—including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, and nine divisions of the American Psychological Association (APA)—Simonton has served as president of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics and the Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts (APA, Division 10). Currently, he is the president-elect of the Society for General Psychology (APA, Division 1) and a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California. Dean Simonton obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1975.

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

i picked this up together with some other books on sociology of science at the behest of liam bright in his #noheroes reading list. simonton's project in this book is to develop a probabilistic model for scientific creativity that incorporates attributes of individual scientists and social context, with some light mechanistic undertones. more specifically, he proposes that each scientist is exposed to a set of scientific items (say, ideas), and that scientific output results from the combining these ideas together until a scientist finds a novel and interesting combination, which are taken to be rare. as the basis for something like an agent-based model, i would find this compelling, but simonton never actually develops the model formally; indeed the whole book amounts to little more than an extended verbal thought experiment together with some underreported regressions. to simonton a process is poisson distributed if the outcome is rare, citation counts are direct measurements of the creativity of a scientific product, and causal identification is unnecessary, which is pretty bold given that he's essentially trying to make a bunch of complex moderation claims. this style of research is straight out of the 60s and 70s and it was sloppy and fun when price was doing it, but it's pretty hard to justify for work in the early aughts

[Neil]

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