Department of Philosophy, Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of Sevilla, C/Camilo José Cela S/N. C.P: 41018, Sevilla, Spain; ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Christinenstr, 18/19, Haus 8D, 10119, Berlin.
Stud Hist Philos Sci. 2023 Aug;100:81-89. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsa.2023.05.003. Epub 2023 Jun 23.
This paper revisits the standard definition of scientific creativity in the contemporary philosophical literature. The standard definition of creativity says that there are two necessary, and jointly sufficient, conditions for creativity, novelty and value. This paper proposes to characterize the value condition of creativity in terms of "pursuitworthiness". The notion of pursuitworthiness, adopted from the recent debate on scientific pursuit in philosophy of science, refers to a form of prospective epistemic worth. It indicates that a certain object (such as a scientific hypothesis) is promising or has the potential to be epistemically fertile in the future, if further investigated. To support the claim that creative scientific instances are, qua creative, valuable in the sense of pursuitworthy, three examples of creative hypotheses taken from the history of the geosciences are introduced: MacCulloch's continuity hypothesis in mid-19th-century geology, Baron et al.'s phylogenetic hypothesis in contemporary paleontology, and the widely discussed Anthropocene hypothesis.
本文重新审视了当代哲学文献中科学创造力的标准定义。创造力的标准定义认为，创造力有两个必要且充分的条件，即新颖性和价值。本文提出用“值得追求”来描述创造力的价值条件。值得追求的概念来自于科学哲学中关于科学追求的最新争论，它指的是一种前瞻性的认识价值。它表明，如果进一步研究，某个对象（如科学假设）具有未来有希望或有潜力在认识上富有成效。为了支持这样一种观点，即具有创造性的科学实例在值得追求的意义上是有价值的，本文引入了三个来自地球科学史的创造性假设的例子：麦克卢洛克在 19 世纪中期地质学中的连续性假设、巴伦等人在当代古生物学中的系统发育假设，以及广泛讨论的人类世假设。
