Creativity:

What is creative thinking? This is usually identified as divergent thinking, which is contrasted with convergent thinking. Rather than seek the correct answer, in divergent thinking the person is supposed to find various solutions to a problem, the more, and the more unlikely, the better.

Can creativity be measured? Guilford and others have come up with psychometric methods, which are reliable and are seen to be different from IQ, which differentiate people on what they call creative thinking, but there is no evidence that these tests correlate with any important behavior. It is unknown whether people can be measured on a cross-domain and useful quality of creativity.

Is creativity a learnable skill? There is an industry to teach creativity, and there are social conditions designed to enhance creativity, such as establishing "brainstorming" sessions, but there is no good evidence that any of these things do anything related to whatever most people deem really creative activity.

Consider the concept of continuity discussed by Weisberg in his chapter on case studies in inventions. (On reserve) What exactly does continuity refer to? How does the concept of creativity compare with ordinary problem solving?

Often genius and creativity are thought of as being similar; also differentiating creativity and world class expertise is not easy or obvious. In order for someone to be deemed creative, she has to find novel solutions to problems, or generate a product that shows novelty. One problem with this analysis, is that novelty alone is not enough to identify someone as creative. The novel solution has to be deemed worthy, and the criteria for this are not clear.

When we consider child prodigies or world class performance, it is unclear how to classify the individuals who exhibit that performance. There are differences between what is generally thought to be simply highly skilled individuals, and those for whom the appellation genius applies. Here is a list of some people who have been called genius at one time or another. What can we say about them either individually or as a group? Aristotle, Shakespeare, Mozart, Muhammad Ali, Einstein, Michael Jordan, Rembrandt, Joe DiMaggio, Thomas Edison, Bobby Fischer, Martin Luther King Jr., Itzak Perlman, Mother Teresa, etc.