Imagine uses the same mash-up method that was so successful in How We Decide, but the science of creativity simply isn’t as developed as the science of decision-making. Because of this, it turns out that Lehrer’s tried-and-true method doesn’t work quite as well. The difficulty with pinning down creativity — scientifically or otherwise — becomes obvious when you consider the diversity of anecdotal examples in the book. Is writing a song comparable to coming up with new uses for glue or solving a puzzle that has only one correct answer? Is the person who writes twenty cookie-cutter novels engaged in the same activity as the person who writes one book so unprecedented that it changes the trajectory of literature? Are any two creative processes really the same? At most, it seems that one could point out patterns, but Lehrer boldly sets his sights on formula.
I suspect Lehrer may be another in the school of catch-phrase thinking pioneered by David Brooks (in Bobos in Paradise) and sedulously pursued by Malcolm Gladwell: Coming up with a catchy title and building a thesis around it. One gets the impression that these people arrived at their conclusion long before they did a stick of research and that all they were looking for was what confirmed what they had already concluded.
Agreed. From Brooks to Lehrer here, to Dawkins, so much of this is inductive reasoning—looking for examples to support a foregone conclusion—rather than deductive reasoning—looking at the data to find patterns and develop conclusions with no prior assumptions.
ReplyDeleteInductive reasoning is at the heart of a lot of this contemporary social-scientific rhetoric, on all sides. It's also at the heart of a lot of the books being published in popular neuroscience that try to explain away all states of human consciousness as merely the products of brain chemistry. It's at the heart of attempts to explain away spiritual experiences as pathological.
One definitely ought to be suspicious of it, since inductive reasoning is the sign of a closed mind, not one open to perceiving what is actually there.