Creative Agents Bibliography

• Books
  1. Baer, John (1993) Creativity and Divergent Thinking: A Task-Specific Approach (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum).
  2. Damasio, Antonio r. (1994) DesCartes' Error (New York, NY: Putnam).
  3. French, Robert M. (1995) he Subtlety of Sameness -- A Theory and Computer Model of Analogy-Making (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

     This can be read in conjunction of with Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (Hofstadter) and together they provide a good understanding of what the authors call "slippage" -- the replacement of one concept in a context by another, related concept. The claim is that the cognitive mechanisms that underlie human analogy-making are based on slippage and that it is central to among other things, creative writing.

  4. Hofstadter, Douglas (1995) Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies New York, NY: Basic Books).

     A set of essays that use computer models to explore fundamental mechanisms of thought. Of Particular interest are chapter five "The Copycat Project: A Model of Mental Fluidity and Analogy-making" and chapter nine "The Emergent Personality of Tabletop, a Perception-based Model of Analogy - making."

  5. Sternberg, Robert J.,ed. (1988) The Nature of Creativity: Contemporary Psychological Perspectives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).
  6. Whitehead, A.H. (1969) Process and Reality (New York, NY: The Free Press).

     The classic metaphysics of organism that upholds the category of 'relatedness' over 'quality.' Under the category of the ultimate, we find 'many,' 'one,' and 'creativity' thus we should not expect any explanations of creativity since it is basic to the explanation of everything else. But if one has the patience and the ability to extract practical hypothesis from abstract material, there is hardly a better source. At the very least, Whitehead provides perceptive critiques of much of the Western philosophical tradition.

• Book Chapters
  1. Ricoeur, Paul (1981) "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling." In Johnson, M., ed., Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press), 228-247.

     Metaphor is characterized by its capacity to provide untranslatable, irreducible information. To understand how we can generate metaphor, Ricoeur makes use of Kant's prototypical work on imagination and offers and psychological/semantic theory of imagination. It is interesting to compare Ricoeur's notion of untranslatability with that of maximal complexity or irreducible mathematical information (cf. Chaitin, G.J. (1990) Algorithmic Information Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).

  2. Johnson, M. (1987) "Toward a Theory of Imagination." In Johnson, M. The Body in the Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).

     A nice discussion of imagination and creativity in the Kantian vein.

  3. Journal Articles
     • Test Reviews
       1. Chase, Clinton I. (1985) "Review of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking," in Mitchell, James V., ed., 9th Mental Measurements Yearbook, vol. II (Lincoln, NB: Buros Institute of Mental Measurement), 1631-1632.
       2. Swartz, Jon D. (1988) "Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking," in Keyser, D.J. & Sweetland, R.C., eds., Test Critiques, vol. VII, 619-662.
       3. Treffinger, Donald J. (1985) "Review of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking," in Mitchell, James V., ed., 9th Mental Measurements Yearbook, vol. II (Lincoln, NB: Buros Institute of Mental Measurement), 1632-1634.
     • Definitions of Creativity
       1. Torrance, E. Paul (1988) "The Nature of Creativity as Manifest in its Testing," in Sternberg, Robert J., ed., The Nature of Creativity: Contemporary Psychological Perspectives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).
  4. Tests of Creativity
  5. On-Line Papers
     1. Bringsjord, S. and Laly, A. (1997) "Chess Isn't Tough Enough: Better Games for Mind-Machine Competition." (From AAAI 97 Proceedings, AAAI Press.)

        This paper is both a defense of the view that Deep Blue and similar systems have no creativity and a call for Mind-Machine contests -- e.g., those involving story generation -- that do get at creativity.

     2. Bringsjord, S. and Noel, R. (1997) "Why Did Evolution Engineer Consciousness?"

        It seems entirely possible that creatures having our behavioral powers but lacking consciousness could have evolved -- so why didn't such creatures (often call "zombies" in the literature) evolve? Bringsjord and Noel answer this question by appealing to creativity. Their own implementations in the area of machine creativity are presented.

     3. Bringsjord, S. "Why Henrik Ibsen Threatens Computer Generated Literature"

        Bringsjord argues that in order for a machine to be literarily creative it must have the capacity to adopt the point of view of a fictional character (a technique ferociously used by Henrik Ibsen) -- but such a capacity is beyond a machine.

  6. Other On-Line Bibliographies on Creativity
     1. one with a business slant