On March 8, 2016, Prof. Giovanni Emanuele Corazza held the seminar entitled “The dynamic definition of creativity: potential originality and effectiveness” at Universitè Paris Descartes.
The talk started by considering the central role of creativity in the future post-information society, followed by a call for a pragmatist approach to creativity studies, bringing as a consequence the recognition of the dynamic nature of this phenomenon.
At the foundation of the proposed new theoretical framework lies the definition of creativity itself, which is turned from static to dynamic through the introduction of the concept of potential originality and effectiveness. Starting from this central definition, and through the introduction of several auxiliary definitions, we arrive at novel definitions for creative achievement and creative inconclusiveness. While both aspects are key in the creative process, creative inconclusiveness was not part of previous definitions, but it can be argued that its role is most fundamental for effective education in creativity. The new definitions are shown to have full backward compatibility with the extant corpus of scientific research in creativity, as well as forward effectiveness in suggesting novel investigation approaches to support the consideration of new theoretical hypotheses.