Imagination and Creativity
Comparing Berrys Gaut's and Dustin Stokes's views on the role of imagination in creativity.
“For consider Deep Blue, the chess computer which beat Kasparov in 1997. Deep Blue really does survey vastly more possible positions than any human. Could, and selects from them the one most likely to win the game. Deep Blue has in this sense a powerful imagination. But the problem is that it is the epitome of an uncreative way to play chess: it mechanically searches. Through the possible positions to arrive at the best.” (Gaut, Creativity and Imagination, 277)
For Gaut, creativity has three desiderata: originality, quality, and intentionality. Regarding this last condition, Gaut uses (what strikes me as) an odd word for this last desideratum, “flair”, which is meant to “rule out cases of making by chance or by mechanical procedure” (270). This strikes me as an ad hoc maneuver designed to avoid having to classify as creative the behavior of computers like Deep Blue or visually generative AI like Midjourney, which is, by any functionalist account, eminently creative.
How does Gaut’s dubious definition of creativity relate to imagination?
After dismissing the display (3.1) and search (3.2) models of imagination, Gaut proffers his definition of imagination as the vehicle of active creativity, i.e., “allows one to be playful, to play with different hypotheses, and to play with different ways of making objects” (280). These various possibilities with which the imagination “plays” are supplied by the engine of creativity, which, in contrast to Stokes’s view (forthcoming), Gaut does not regard imagination as supplying. Per Gaut’s definition of imagination, Deep Blue certainly has one: it entertains many possibilities and selects the one that best plays the game, chess, with which it is engaged.
After driving a wedge between creativity and imagination, Gaut’s view permits Deep Blue to have imagination while lacking creativity—something that Stokes’s view precludes.