TY  - JOUR
AB  - Over the last four decades arguments for and against the claim that creative hypothesis formation is based on Darwinian "blind" variation have been put forward. This paper offers a new and systematic route through this long-lasting debate. It distinguishes between undirected, random, and unjustified variation, to prevent widespread confusions regarding the meaning of undirected variation. These misunderstandings concern Lamarckism, equiprobability, developmental constraints, and creative hypothesis formation. The paper then introduces and develops the standard critique that creative hypothesis formation is guided rather than blind, integrating developments from contemporary research on creativity. On that basis, I discuss three compatibility arguments that have been used to answer the critique. These arguments do not deny guided variation but insist that an important analogy exists nonetheless. These compatibility arguments all fail, even though they do so for different reasons: trivialisation, conceptual confusion, and lack of evidence respectively. Revisiting the debate in this manner not only allows us to see where exactly a "Darwinian" account of creative hypothesis formation goes wrong, but also to see that the debate is not about factual issues, but about the interpretation of these factual issues in Darwinian terms.
DA  - 2009
DO  - 10.1007/s11229-009-9498-8
KW  - Darwinism
KW  - Blind variation
KW  - Creativity
KW  - Hypothesis formation
KW  - Guided variation
KW  - Lamarckism
KW  - Evolutionary epistemology
KW  - Popper
KW  - Campbell
KW  - Simonton
LA  - eng
IS  - 2
M2  - 193
PY  - 2009
SN  - 0039-7857
SP  - 193-218
T2  - Synthese
TI  - Darwinian ‘blind’ hypothesis formation revisited
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-25406808
Y2  - 2024-11-24T09:47:44
ER  -