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81 Creativity
Put in this bald way, these aims sound utopian. How utopian they areor rather, how imminent their realization-depends on how broadly or narrowly we interpret the term "creative." If we are willing to regard all human complex problem solving as creative, then-as we will point out-successful programs for problem solving mechanisms that simulate human problem solvers already exist, and a number of their general characteristics are known. If we reserve the term "creative" for activities like discovery of the special theory of relativity or the composition of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, then no example of a creative mechanism exists at the present time. (Simon, 1979, pp. 144-145)Among the questions that can now be given preliminary answers in computational terms are the following: how can ideas from very different sources be spontaneously thought of together? how can two ideas be merged to produce a new structure, which shows the influence of both ancestor ideas without being a mere "cut-and-paste" combination? how can the mind be "primed," so that one will more easily notice serendipitous ideas? why may someone notice-and remember-something fairly uninteresting, if it occurs in an interesting context? how can a brief phrase conjure up an entire melody from memory? and how can we accept two ideas as similar ("love" and "prove" as rhyming, for instance) in respect of a feature not identical in both? The features of connectionist AI models that suggest answers to these questions are their powers of pattern completion, graceful degradation, sensitization, multiple constraint satisfaction, and "best-fit" equilibration.... Here, the important point is that the unconscious, "insightful," associative aspects of creativity can be explained-in outline, at least-by AI methods. (Boden, 1996, p. 273)There thus appears to be an underlying similarity in the process involved in creative innovation and social independence, with common traits and postures required for expression of both behaviors. The difference is one of product-literary, musical, artistic, theoretical products on the one hand, opinions on the other-rather than one of process. In both instances the individual must believe that his perceptions are meaningful and valid and be willing to rely upon his own interpretations. He must trust himself sufficiently that even when persons express opinions counter to his own he can proceed on the basis of his own perceptions and convictions. (Coopersmith, 1967, p. 58)he average level of ego strength and emotional stability is noticeably higher among creative geniuses than among the general population, though it is possibly lower than among men of comparable intelligence and education who go into administrative and similar positions. High anxiety and excitability appear common (e.g. Priestley, Darwin, Kepler) but full-blown neurosis is quite rare. (Cattell & Butcher, 1970, p. 315)he insight that is supposed to be required for such work as discovery turns out to be synonymous with the familiar process of recognition; and other terms commonly used in the discussion of creative work-such terms as "judgment," "creativity," or even "genius"-appear to be wholly dispensable or to be definable, as insight is, in terms of mundane and well-understood concepts. (Simon, 1989, p. 376)From the sketch material still in existence, from the condition of the fragments, and from the autographs themselves we can draw definite conclusions about Mozart's creative process. To invent musical ideas he did not need any stimulation; they came to his mind "ready-made" and in polished form. In contrast to Beethoven, who made numerous attempts at shaping his musical ideas until he found the definitive formulation of a theme, Mozart's first inspiration has the stamp of finality. Any Mozart theme has completeness and unity; as a phenomenon it is a Gestalt. (Herzmann, 1964, p. 28)Great artists enlarge the limits of one's perception. Looking at the world through the eyes of Rembrandt or Tolstoy makes one able to perceive aspects of truth about the world which one could not have achieved without their aid. Freud believed that science was adaptive because it facilitated mastery of the external world; but was it not the case that many scientific theories, like works of art, also originated in phantasy? Certainly, reading accounts of scientific discovery by men of the calibre of Einstein compelled me to conclude that phantasy was not merely escapist, but a way of reaching new insights concerning the nature of reality. Scientific hypotheses require proof; works of art do not. Both are concerned with creating order, with making sense out of the world and our experience of it. (Storr, 1993, p. xii)The importance of self-esteem for creative expression appears to be almost beyond disproof. Without a high regard for himself the individual who is working in the frontiers of his field cannot trust himself to discriminate between the trivial and the significant. Without trust in his own powers the person seeking improved solutions or alternative theories has no basis for distinguishing the significant and profound innovation from the one that is merely different.... An essential component of the creative process, whether it be analysis, synthesis, or the development of a new perspective or more comprehensive theory, is the conviction that one's judgment in interpreting the events is to be trusted. (Coopersmith, 1967, p. 59)In the daily stream of thought these four different stages [preparation; incubation; illumination or inspiration; and verification] constantly overlap each other as we explore different problems. An economist reading a Blue Book, a physiologist watching an experiment, or a business man going through his morning's letters, may at the same time be "incubating" on a problem which he proposed to himself a few days ago, be accumulating knowledge in "preparation" for a second problem, and be "verifying" his conclusions to a third problem. Even in exploring the same problem, the mind may be unconsciously incubating on one aspect of it, while it is consciously employed in preparing for or verifying another aspect. (Wallas, 1926, p. 81)he basic, bisociative pattern of the creative synthesis [is] the sudden interlocking of two previously unrelated skills, or matrices of thought. (Koestler, 1964, p. 121)11) The Earliest Stages in the Creative Process Involve a Commerce with DisorderEven to the creator himself, the earliest effort may seem to involve a commerce with disorder. For the creative order, which is an extension of life, is not an elaboration of the established, but a movement beyond the established, or at least a reorganization of it and often of elements not included in it. The first need is therefore to transcend the old order. Before any new order can be defined, the absolute power of the established, the hold upon us of what we know and are, must be broken. New life comes always from outside our world, as we commonly conceive that world. This is the reason why, in order to invent, one must yield to the indeterminate within him, or, more precisely, to certain illdefined impulses which seem to be of the very texture of the ungoverned fullness which John Livingston Lowes calls "the surging chaos of the unexpressed." (Ghiselin, 1985, p. 4)New life comes always from outside our world, as we commonly conceive our world. This is the reason why, in order to invent, one must yield to the indeterminate within him, or, more precisely, to certain illdefined impulses which seem to be of the very texture of the ungoverned fullness which John Livingston Lowes calls "the surging chaos of the unexpressed." Chaos and disorder are perhaps the wrong terms for that indeterminate fullness and activity of the inner life. For it is organic, dynamic, full of tension and tendency. What is absent from it, except in the decisive act of creation, is determination, fixity, and commitment to one resolution or another of the whole complex of its tensions. (Ghiselin, 1952, p. 13)[P]sychoanalysts have principally been concerned with the content of creative products, and with explaining content in terms of the artist's infantile past. They have paid less attention to examining why the artist chooses his particular activity to express, abreact or sublimate his emotions. In short, they have not made much distinction between art and neurosis; and, since the former is one of the blessings of mankind, whereas the latter is one of the curses, it seems a pity that they should not be better differentiated....Psychoanalysis, being fundamentally concerned with drive and motive, might have been expected to throw more light upon what impels the creative person that in fact it has. (Storr, 1993, pp. xvii, 3)A number of theoretical approaches were considered. Associative theory, as developed by Mednick (1962), gained some empirical support from the apparent validity of the Remote Associates Test, which was constructed on the basis of the theory.... Koestler's (1964) bisociative theory allows more complexity to mental organization than Mednick's associative theory, and postulates "associative contexts" or "frames of reference." He proposed that normal, non-creative, thought proceeds within particular contexts or frames and that the creative act involves linking together previously unconnected frames.... Simonton (1988) has developed associative notions further and explored the mathematical consequences of chance permutation of ideas....Like Koestler, Gruber (1980; Gruber and Davis, 1988) has based his analysis on case studies. He has focused especially on Darwin's development of the theory of evolution. Using piagetian notions, such as assimilation and accommodation, Gruber shows how Darwin's system of ideas changed very slowly over a period of many years. "Moments of insight," in Gruber's analysis, were the culminations of slow long-term processes.... Finally, the information-processing approach, as represented by Simon (1966) and Langley et al. (1987), was considered.... [Simon] points out the importance of good problem representations, both to ensure search is in an appropriate problem space and to aid in developing heuristic evaluations of possible research directions.... The work of Langley et al. (1987) demonstrates how such search processes, realized in computer programs, can indeed discover many basic laws of science from tables of raw data.... Boden (1990a, 1994) has stressed the importance of restructuring the problem space in creative work to develop new genres and paradigms in the arts and sciences. (Gilhooly, 1996, pp. 243-244; emphasis in original)Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Creativity
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82 Grammar
I think that the failure to offer a precise account of the notion "grammar" is not just a superficial defect in linguistic theory that can be remedied by adding one more definition. It seems to me that until this notion is clarified, no part of linguistic theory can achieve anything like a satisfactory development.... I have been discussing a grammar of a particular language here as analogous to a particular scientific theory, dealing with its subject matter (the set of sentences of this language) much as embryology or physics deals with its subject matter. (Chomsky, 1964, p. 213)Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of his language are necessarily accurate. (Chomsky, 1965, p. 8)Much effort has been devoted to showing that the class of possible transformations can be substantially reduced without loss of descriptive power through the discovery of quite general conditions that all such rules and the representations they operate on and form must meet.... [The] transformational rules, at least for a substantial core grammar, can be reduced to the single rule, "Move alpha" (that is, "move any category anywhere"). (Mehler, Walker & Garrett, 1982, p. 21)4) The Relationship of Transformational Grammar to Semantics and to Human Performancehe implications of assuming a semantic memory for what we might call "generative psycholinguistics" are: that dichotomous judgments of semantic well-formedness versus anomaly are not essential or inherent to language performance; that the transformational component of a grammar is the part most relevant to performance models; that a generative grammar's role should be viewed as restricted to language production, whereas sentence understanding should be treated as a problem of extracting a cognitive representation of a text's message; that until some theoretical notion of cognitive representation is incorporated into linguistic conceptions, they are unlikely to provide either powerful language-processing programs or psychologically relevant theories.Although these implications conflict with the way others have viewed the relationship of transformational grammars to semantics and to human performance, they do not eliminate the importance of such grammars to psychologists, an importance stressed in, and indeed largely created by, the work of Chomsky. It is precisely because of a growing interdependence between such linguistic theory and psychological performance models that their relationship needs to be clarified. (Quillian, 1968, p. 260)here are some terminological distinctions that are crucial to explain, or else confusions can easily arise. In the formal study of grammar, a language is defined as a set of sentences, possibly infinite, where each sentence is a string of symbols or words. One can think of each sentence as having several representations linked together: one for its sound pattern, one for its meaning, one for the string of words constituting it, possibly others for other data structures such as the "surface structure" and "deep structure" that are held to mediate the mapping between sound and meaning. Because no finite system can store an infinite number of sentences, and because humans in particular are clearly not pullstring dolls that emit sentences from a finite stored list, one must explain human language abilities by imputing to them a grammar, which in the technical sense is a finite rule system, or programme, or circuit design, capable of generating and recognizing the sentences of a particular language. This "mental grammar" or "psychogrammar" is the neural system that allows us to speak and understand the possible word sequences of our native tongue. A grammar for a specific language is obviously acquired by a human during childhood, but there must be neural circuitry that actually carries out the acquisition process in the child, and this circuitry may be called the language faculty or language acquisition device. An important part of the language faculty is universal grammar, an implementation of a set of principles or constraints that govern the possible form of any human grammar. (Pinker, 1996, p. 263)A grammar of language L is essentially a theory of L. Any scientific theory is based on a finite number of observations, and it seeks to relate the observed phenomena and to predict new phenomena by constructing general laws in terms of hypothetical constructs.... Similarly a grammar of English is based on a finite corpus of utterances (observations), and it will contain certain grammatical rules (laws) stated in terms of the particular phonemes, phrases, etc., of English (hypothetical constructs). These rules express structural relations among the sentences of the corpus and the infinite number of sentences generated by the grammar beyond the corpus (predictions). (Chomsky, 1957, p. 49)Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Grammar
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