Epistemology and Creative Invention

Journal of Cultural and Evolutionary Psychology, 3(2005)2, 119–140

EPISTEMOLOGY AND CREATIVE INVENTION

CONSTANCE MILBRATH

Department of Pediatrics, University of California, San Francisco

Abstract. This paper describes social and epistemological models foreign to the area of creative psychology and applies them toward an analysis of a uniquely creative moment in prehistory, the origin of cave painting. The models presented have been used to study creative discovery in the history of science and in the thought of developing children. Kuhn’s model of scientific change as “revolution” ushered in by scientific crisis is used to understand the socio-cultural context in which the cultural revolution peculiar to Homo sapiens in Paleolithic Europe occurred. Piaget’s model of cognitive development is used to understand the cognitions that created the unparalleled images observed in the earliest known cave paintings and developed the manifest artistic practices. Although it is proposed that crisis kindled a social disruption which fostered the cultural transfor- mation, the cognitive instruments, mechanisms, and processes humans use to construct knowledge are assumed to have operated uninterrupted and much as they do in present day humans. This assumption of functional continuity allowed exploration of the cognitive tools and generative processes evident in the cave images that Homo sapiens used to invent and evolve the domain we now call art. The application of these two models to what is known about the social context of the Upper Paleolithic period in which cave painting first emerged and to the cave paintings themselves is taken as a step toward a deeper contemplation of the question of how creative innovations in human thought develop.

Keywords: epistemology, cultural revolution, cave painting

Discovery and invention, as the work of creative individuals, emerge in social and historical contexts that provide the crucial momentum for their transforming power. This paper is an attempt to contemplate how creative innovations develop by ana- lyzing the first European Paleolithic cave paintings in the context of their origins using social and cognitive models of scientific and developmental change. The proposed social model is based on KUHN’s (1970a) analysis of the growth of scientific knowledge, a model that also has been applied to modern revolutions in art1 (ACKERMAN 1969; HAFNER 1969). Although controversial (see LAKATOS 1970; LAU-

1 In defending certain parallels between developments in science, philosophy, and art, KUHN (1970b) acknowledged that philosophy and art do not meet the “demarcation” criterion of a science “but they neverthe- less progress as the sciences do. In antiquity and during the Renaissance, the arts rather than the sciences pro- vided the accepted paradigms of progress” (p. 244).

1589–5254 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest 120 C. MILBRATH

DAN 1977; POPPER 1970), KUHN’s views best fit the purposes of this paper because they rest on a socio-historical analysis of scientific communities rather than on a methodological analysis of falsification and problems solved by scientific theories. The cognitive model taken from PIAGET (1987a, b; PIAGET and GARCIA 1983/1989) addresses advances in innovative thinking from a developmental framework and has been applied both to discovery and invention in science and to the origination of new ideas in the minds of developing children. After presenting these models, they are applied to developments during “the revolution in human cultural evolution” (WHITE 2003), a period in prehistory some scholars mark as the origins of modern human art (GAMBLE 1994).

THE SOCIAL AND THE EPISTEMIC PARADIGM

A distinction between social and epistemic paradigms aids in clarifying the social and cognitive framing employed in the present analysis (PIAGET and GARCIA 1983/1989). The social paradigm refers to the shared commitments to particular scientific models and values that prescribe acceptable scientific practice (KUHN 1970a). Shaped by socially accepted norms and upheld by dominant social groups, it directs the practice of what KUHN (1970a) called normal science; namely the “actu- alization of the promise” inherent in an accepted scientific framework through con- tinuing articulation of existent phenomena and theories consistent with the framework. The epistemic paradigm, in contrast, is not imposed by socially accepted norms but results from “...the natural way to think about science at a particular period” for any scientifically minded individual (PIAGET and GARCIA 1983/1989). It con- stitutes the important and accepted body of transmitted knowledge that, through action on the cognitive operations of the scientist, forms an epistemic framework or world view (Weltanschauung). KUHN’s (1970a) portrayal of shared exemplars as the cornerstone of disciplinary training in science is one characterization of such an inherited epistemic framework (e.g., Newton’s second Law of Motion). This framework determines how experience is assimilated and insures that members of the same scientific community “learn to see the same thing when confronted by the same stimuli” (KUHN 1970a, p. 193). Once a given epistemic framework is consti- tuted, it is no longer dissociable from the social paradigm because it acts as an “ide- ology”, conditioning further developments and creating an epistemic obstacle to alternatives that depart from the accepted social paradigm (PIAGET and GARCIA 1983/1989).2

2 For example, the Chinese arrived at the concept of inertia over 2000 years before western science because their view was of a world that was in a constant state of change, the natural state of affairs being that all things were in motion. In contrast, the Aristotelian view was of a world that was static, therefore, motion required an outside force.

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