Florentin Koch

Contemporary debates on artificial creativity are fragmented into incompatible theoretical traditions. A central divide opposes ontologically demanding approaches (grounding creativity in lived experience, intentionality, or existential sense-making) to operational frameworks prioritizing empirical testability. This article argues that ontologically strong accounts, exemplified by Chiodo’s (2025) recent contribution in this journal, rely on stipulative criteria that encode the exclusion of artificial systems into their definitions of creativity, rendering the question conceptually closed rather than empirically assessable. We show this strategy reflects a recurring pattern of ontological immunization in contemporary philosophy of creativity. Against this backdrop, we develop a method- ological alternative preserving creativity’s normative dimension without presupposing the agent’s ontological status. We propose a tridimensional framework: (i) graded novelty, operationalized as measurable distance within a domain; (ii) value, assessed through empirically accessible responses including blind expert judgments and neu- roaesthetic correlates; (iii) normative reflexivity, defined functionally as a system’s capacity for self-evaluation and transformation of generative processes. This framework enables cumulative, comparative, and falsifiable investigation across human, artificial, and hybrid systems, while remaining agnostic regarding metaphys- ical questions about consciousness. By shifting debate from ontological exclusion to methodological accountability, we reopen artificial creativity as a legitimate object of empirical and philosophical inquiry.

Philosophy of science increasingly appeals to structural constraints to explain phys ical laws’ form and modal robustness, yet lacks a criterion for distinguishing genuinely constraining principles from empirical assumptions. This article introduces the structural demon, an idealized agent determining admissible law-forms from empirically established structural facts independently of initial conditions. The demon yields an operational crite rion of structural effectiveness and motivates structural necessity governing law-forms prior to particular laws. A case study of Fourier’s heat equation shows how locality, conservation, and isotropy uniquely fix the Laplacian form while leaving a thin empirical residue.

This methodological essay develops a methodology for productive dialogue between philosophical aesthetics and empirical research on art. For empiricists, it identifies three standing constraints on how philosophical conclusions can be drawn from data: the normative/descriptive distinction (normative positions cannot be empirically falsified), the is–ought gap (descriptive findings do not on their own license normative conclusions), and the hard problem of consciousness (neural correlates do not resolve phenomenal questions). It derives from these constraints a concrete recommendation: researchers should pre-specify which class of philosophical position is targeted, what prediction distinguishes it from alternatives, and how strong the evidential pressure is. For theorists, it argues that descriptive positions face scalar empirical pressure calibrated by evidence quality, and that normative positions face prescriptive cost rather than falsification. Evidence from five empirical domains—neuroaesthetics, psychology of arts, computational aesthetics, cross-cultural aesthetics, and AI and creativity research —is assessed using this methodology against five classical philosophical debates: ontology, experience, interpretation, value, and creativity. The cross-domain verdict is consistent: extreme positions face strong pressure while intermediate frameworks integrating formal and contextual factors receive support across independent evidence streams.