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Creativity

Plaiting Gravy

Les Jones on allegories, specific domains and Wittgenstein’s social ideas.

The word ‘creativity’ is derived from the Latin word creare; literally, ‘to cause, to create, to make’. But this definition itself suggests problems. Humans can certainly make things by putting other things together; but do we have the capacity to create something new, as it were, from nothing? Well, like many others, I will take refuge in the phrase “it all depends what you mean by…” The idea that creation was only in God’s realm seems to have been ditched in the seventeenth century. The word creativity seems to have acquired its present meaning around that time, with its implication that humans too can be creative.

One thing we need to clear up first, is that creativity and discovery are not the same thing.

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