What is the knowledge object of creativity science and how can this knowledge object and methods to study it best be conceptualized? Concepts are crucial for scientific forms of creativity, but concepts cannot be taken for granted. This is the approach of the professional teacher confronting novices. In real life, core concepts are discovered by overcoming a number of constraints. But scientists are not the only ones doing creative work. This is the reason why the concept creativity regime is crucial for creativity science. But all creativity regimes (patterns of creativity) are ultimately modeled upon nature as prototype (n-creativity) but in different ways (problem situations/types of constraints). Clarifying the nature of these constraints helps us overcome the nature-culture divide, clarify core concepts such as knowledge constraints, physical constraints, intra- and inter species co-evolution, critique the current state of the art and identify unsolved problems for future research.

Creativity is constrained in many ways, but there is always a personal dimension involved. Post-structuralist theorists such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Rosalind Krauss all tend to foreground the role of prototypes, conceptualized as languages, in a too rigid (death of the author) and too underdetermined (contingency) manner. Both Adolf Hitler and Thomas Mann wrote in German, and both considered themselves to be artists, but their German creativity had very different aims. Neither have ideas of children as romantic geniuses or the theory of explaining individuals which have made a historical impact as result of “genius” been helpful. Historical impact is basically the result of a sociocognitive role (pioneers solving tricky problems such as how to transform a civilized nation into a brutal one and how to explain this feat retrospectively). But such roles are best seen as results of personal learning processes, involving two other roles, novices and professionals.

This chapter elaborates upon Aristotle’s methodological theory of First principles and tries to bring it up to date by relating it to different debates about data and methods of relevance for creativity science. The theory of “Whig history” as used by Kuhn forbids retroactive analysis. Kuhn ignores the fact that successful scientific revolutions solve tricky problems and generalizes from an unsuccessful revolution (fallacy of induction). Pioneers are effective causes (no death of the author, compare Barthes). Autobiographies are not always reliable and are merely a part of observing pioneering work or intellectual biographies. Creative processes are complex (compare Diamond’s “Anna Karenina” principle). This is the reason that biographical data on pioneers can best be seen as natural experiments. The data base should be broad (interdisciplinary) and contrasted both across and within intellectual fields or creativity regimes. A theory of methodology is missing in both rationalist and empiricist accounts of scientific creativity.

One of the unsolved problems of creativity science is whether Darwin can explain Darwin. This problem has usually been approached via Campbell’s theory of spontaneous generation and blind selection. But this ignores the fact that natural selection is strongly constrained by parsimony and the build-up of increasing complexity over time. Darwin’s theory of how n-creativity is possible is basically a constraint theory but a very complex (Five-factor) one according to Ernst Mayr. Among these factors is speciation processes by geographical isolation of interbreeding species. But speciation processes are merely a special case of protection. All newly born life forms are vulnerable at the start and need to be protected to survive. This chapter looks at how such vulnerable versions are protected in cultural forms of creativity. It identifies five factors: geographical and intellectual migration, organizational and collegial forms of secrecy and the critical role of support systems.

This chapter basically describes how I arrived at the theoretical model for how to analyze or interpret concrete cases of pioneering work. For a creativity science to be possible, we must broaden our knowledge base and avoid the temptation to study only scientific, artistic or technological forms of creativity or some narrow aspect, the approach of specialized disciplines. Nor should creativity science merely foreground one level of creativity such as pioneers, professionals or novices but ask what constrains the three levels and how the transitions between these levels come about in practice. Creativity science should also avoid the temptation to define creativity as novelty or originality. This is best seen by studying the creativity of nature where creative solutions are characterized by parsimony. Studying n-creativity is also of help to identify the important role of protection of vulnerable versions and recognize Aristotle as the founder of creativity science.

Most definitions of creativity foreground novelty or originality. But if we look at how nature solves tricky problems, we discover several interesting things. Successful problem solving tends to be parsimonious (simple, economic or elegant) such as the wax cakes built by bee colonies. The number of basic solutions to such tricky problems of how to design an eye, how to fly and how to make a functioning radar system, are relatively few and have been rediscovered again and again ( a pattern discovered by Richard Dawkins). The fact that nature tends to reuse basic anatomical designs (mammals, birds, reptiles) again and again (common descent, homology) is also a case of parsimony or getting it right. This can be seen as a case of co-evolution but of an intra-species kind. Popper’s and Baxandall’s concepts of how problem situations constrain problem solvers is yet another version of getting it right.

This chapter summarizes the four previous dimensions by combining Darwin and Aristotle. Darwin alone cannot explain Darwin mainly because his theory ultimately rested upon Aristotle’s much more fundamental theory of the structure of creative processes which is basically a theory of what makes knowledge-driven change possible. The model operates with three types of knowledge: theoretical (science), productive ( art and rhetoric) and practical (technology and moral order/ethics). These three types of knowledge constitute distinct creativity regimes, constantly confused in the literature. Technology is a practical, adaptive form of knowledge and creates new facts. Art aims at evoking emotions and transforms facts into fiction. Science aims at falsifying previous theories and separates facts from fiction. Only scientists use methodologies such as basic problem-solving strategies. Artists and orators use techniques and engineers use trial and error. Popper got the aim of science right but its core problem-solving strategy wrong.

Creativity seems to belong to the broad type of phenomena which, like emotions, have causes or conditions but which can take different roads or have different outcomes. This is the basic reason why constraint theory might be a good place to start. Creativity is neither total order, nor total chaos (Simonton, 2007), but something in between, order in or through chaos. But to clarify how constraint theory can help us identify the First principles of creativity science, we need to collect the relevant data. According to Aristotle, a general First principle for all scientific work is for the researcher to get “intimate” with the relevant data (Anagnostopoulos, 2009). With “data” or whatever word Aristotle used, he meant not only raw data observed or collected by the researcher, but also data which had already been collected and interpreted by other researchers (the distinction we today call primary and secondary data was not that important for him). Having compared many intellectual biographies of pioneers (P-creativity as H-creativity) in science, art and technology (S-creativity, A-creativity, T-creativity) with a special focus on the discovery of First principles anddisciplines in the making, I became convinced of the soundness of Aristotle’s approach. The core problem when it comes to data, is not whether they are primary or secondary but if the intimate knowledge gained by such data clarifies the nature of the knowledge object or not (compare Montuschi, 2003).

A constraint theory approach to creativity can conveniently be conceptualized in five different dimensions each of which captures some important way in which creativity is constrained. The five dimensions have been generated by the empirical patterns from comparing disciplines in the making. The first dimension is a list of the most important empirical types of constraints that emerge from theoretical sensitization of comparative data. All creative processes are constrained by physical constraints which was first noted by Hegel in his lectures on aesthetics and rediscovered be Elster. The important role of prototypes has been noticed by the art historian Ragnar Josephson and the literary theorist Johan Svedjedal. The role of knowledge constraints was noted by Randall Collins and elaborated by me. Rules of the game were discovered by Aristotle (theoretical, productive, practical knowledge) and rediscovered by Wittgenstein. Motivations have been at the core of sociopsychological and economic theories of creativity.