Having recently published a memoir, I am in an unashamedly autobiographical mood this year. And so this talk is also unapologetically autobiographical in spirit.
When, around 1991, I began my studies of the creative mind, I believed I could bring to the table a cognitive paradigm that was a fusion of Newell-Simon problem solving psychology (in particular, such aspects as their physical symbol system hypothesis, production systems, Simon's theory of bounded rationality/satisficing, and Newell's knowledge level model of cognition), frames/schemata/semantic network-based knowledge representation theory, and theories of goal-based reasoning and searching drawn from 'classical' artificial intelligence (AI). I believed that this particular brand of cognitive science would provide me with the necessary and sufficient set of tools with which to explore the lives of the minds of scientists, designers, inventors, artists and writers. Implicit to this project was the assumption that I would not be questioning the cognitive paradigm itself. Rather, the paradigm would enable me (and anyone else who adhered to the paradigm) to shed light on creative minds and processes. In an impeccably Kuhnian spirit, I did not think that the paradigm itself was at risk.
And yet - when I compare the cognitive paradigm articulated in Creativity in Invention and Design (1994), my first book on creativity, with the cognitive model I have deployed in The Bengal Renaissance (2006), my most recent work in this area, I am somewhat surprised to see how much the paradigm has evolved. This evolution has been driven by issues and questions and concepts that were simply never part of the older paradigm - but which became central to the nature of my inquiry, the more I entered into the biographical-cultural-historical-social matrix in which creative beings are embedded.
In this talk I will ruminate aloud on how and why, in the course of my investigations, the paradigm changed; and how my cognitive lens became tempered by issues having to do with culture, history and society.