This paper examines what makes a particular action or combination of actions creative, with the understanding that an agent is creative primarily in virtue of the actions they use in relation to some specific goal. We put forward four criteria to characterize an action as creative: it must be purposeful, effective, original, and exploitable. We defend a Bayesian account that integrates these four dimensions together. To illustrate our proposal, we examine two case studies from separate domains: …
Read moreThis paper examines what makes a particular action or combination of actions creative, with the understanding that an agent is creative primarily in virtue of the actions they use in relation to some specific goal. We put forward four criteria to characterize an action as creative: it must be purposeful, effective, original, and exploitable. We defend a Bayesian account that integrates these four dimensions together. To illustrate our proposal, we examine two case studies from separate domains: we first examine a case of creativity in sports (Panenka's original penalty technique) and then a case of creativity in engineering (Black's innovative negative feedback amplifier). Our account ties creativity to the increased likelihood of the sought result under the actions taken, to the low prior initially assigned to those actions, and finally to the belief revision occasioned by that action, measurable in terms of Bayesian surprisal. We argue that the account can meaningfully be generalized to other domains, including arts and artificial intelligence.
