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and scientists were notoriously unpopular during their times of peak contribution,
becoming recognised only after their deaths. Whatever makes an activity creative,
it clearly must be connected with that activity itself, rather than occurring after the
activity has ceased entirely! The value and appropriateness of creative works are
subject to the social context in which they are received—not created.
Of course, lack of centrality to the core concept of creativity is no impediment to
forming a combined concept, say, of valued creativity. And that concept may itself
be valuable. But it is the adherence to a separation between creativity and value that
allows us to see their combination as potentially valuable. 5
13.5.2 The Irrelevance of Appropriateness
As with value, appropriateness has often been considered necessary for creativity,
and again we disagree. Some have claimed that a creative pattern must meet the
constraints imposed by a genre. However, as Boden herself notes, a common way of
devising new conceptual frameworks is to drop or break existing traditions (Boden
2004 , pp. 71-74)! This recognition of the possibility of “inappropriate” creative
works is again possible only if we avoid encumbering the definition of creativity
itself with appropriateness. And Boden's recognition of this is evidence that she has
put aside the appropriateness constraint in practice, if not in theory.
13.5.3 Inferring Frameworks from Patterns
On our definition, a specific pattern provides insufficient information for judging its
creativity: a pattern is only creative relative to its generating framework and avail-
able alternative frameworks. Although in ordinary discourse there are innumerable
cases of objects being described as creative, we suggest that this is a kind of short-
hand for an object being produced by a creative process.
13.5.4 Creativity Viewed as Compression
It has been proposed that creativity is the act of generating patterns that exhibit
previously unknown regularities and facilitate the progressive refinement of an ob-
server's pattern compression algorithm (Schmidhuber 2009 , see also Chap. 12 in
5 We should also note that omission of the concept of value from our definition does not imply
that value has no role in its application. Cultural and other values certainly enter into the choice of
domain and the selection of frameworks for them. We are not aiming at some kind of value-free
science of creativity, but simply a value-free account of creativity itself.
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