Stakeholder Groups in Computational Creativity Research and Practice - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 4

philosophical studies and theoretical advances. We believe that our arguments in
favour of these claims are sufficiently strong for them to be taken to the next level and
tested scientifically through observer-based experimentation—and that the hypothe-
ses provide an agenda the Computational Creativity research community cannot
ignore. To conclude in Sect. 1.7 , we suggest some practical ways in which these
claims (which are presented as numbered hypotheses) could be investigated. In order
to explain and support the claims we make, in the next section, we first present a
philosophical perspective on the notion of creativity, which will introduce ideas that
underpin the material in the rest of the chapter.

1.2 A Perspective on Creativity

We hold that creativity is a secondary and essentially contested quality of a
person, and that linguistic usage of terms related to creativity can often be declarative
illocutionary speech acts. We unpack these assertions below. Firstly, we believe that
attributions of creativity are contextualist, having no truth value which is independent
of context, perception and interpretation. In this way we see creativity attributions as
analogous to the Lockean notion of a secondary quality [ 1 ]. Locke distinguished pri-
mary and secondary qualities , where the former are taken to be intrinsic to an object,
for example, its mass, and the latter are understood to be perception-dependent, for
example, colour. While these Lockean qualities are directly tied to sensory percep-
tion, as opposed to the aesthetic and social category of creativity, the distinction
is still a useful one here, since it highlights different types of properties. Dennett's
intentional stance [ 2 ] is also of interest here: we may adopt a “creativity stance”
towards a person and interpret their work as though they were being creative ,in
order to better understand (rather than predict) their behaviour. Likewise, we may
find that the “creativity stance” provides a new way of understanding the behaviour
of a piece of software which goes beyond the physical details of the program.
Gallie introduced essentially contested concepts as those for which “the proper
use

inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their
users” [ 3 , p. 169], to which Gray added that the disputes “

...

cannot be settled by
appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone” [ 4 , p.344],
and Smith noted that “

...

all argue that the concept is being used inappropriately
by others” [ 5 , p.332]. In the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity , Plucker and Mabel
assert that:

...

... despite the abundance of definitions for creativity and related terms, few are widely used

and many researchers simply avoid defining the relevant terms at all. [ 6 , p.48]

Clearly, certain notions such as art are essentially contested concepts, looking at
the multitude of articles written each year in the popular and cultural press asking:
“But is it Art?” Indeed, Gallie points out that the statement: “This picture is painted
in oils” can be disputed whilst the disputants nevertheless agree on the proper usage