Human creativity, whether exemplified as invention or innovation, has been a subject of interest to many parties.
In whatever form it is manifested, it has to do with novelty.
And be the novelty in science, arts, or other cultural realms, and be it ideational or practical, it is only highly regarded if and when it is beneficial.
As a subject of study, it has indeed been approached from different angles, each highlighting one or some of its many dimensions.
Certain studies scrutinize it by focusing on creative products, some by zooming in on creative processes, others by zeroing in on creative activities, and the rest by concentrating on creative individuals.
According to Dean Keith Simonton, a leading researcher and scholar in the field of creativity, insofar as scientific creativity is concerned, it is an issue which has been dealt with in the history of science, the philosophy of science, the sociology of science, and the psychology of science—disciplines which are termed metasciences.
In Simonton’s assessment, each discipline has a somewhat distinctive outlook on creativity and the disciplinary variation may be due partly to the contrasts in each discipline’s methodological techniques and substantive interests and partly to the essential fact that such creativity can be examined from four principal perspectives: logic, genius, chance, and zeitgeist.
Yet, studying each of the above categories on its own can never offer us a sufficient overall story of creativity.
Many, therefore, have tried to offer a harmonious synthesis of as many reasonable perspectives as possible.
In the case of Simonton, for instance, he had endeavoured to integrate all the aforementioned four perspectives by subsuming the logic, genius, and zeitgeist positions under the chance position.
Whatever the case is, one can hardly doubt that creativity has to do in large part with thinking.
Unfortunately, in a number of attempts to account for creative thinking, one often finds it being primarily contrasted with logical thinking.
At the popular level, one is easily confronted with the belief that the human brain is divided, its left cerebral hemisphere is logical, and its right is creative.
In terms of results, logic is sometimes equated with the expected, though somewhat delayed, while creativity, with the unexpected.
In terms of process, logic is often depicted as being discursive, analytical and pedantic whereas creativity is imaginative, intuitive and holistic.
Or to somewhat appropriate the nomenclature popularized by such philosophers-scientists as Reichenbach and Popper, logic and creativity are two largely independent and distinct psychological processes, the former concerns the context of justification, and the latter, the context of discovery.
Reading some of those accounts may tempt one to entertain the idea that these two kinds, or modes, of thinking are mutually exclusive, acting like two contradictories which cannot both be true at the same time nor be simultaneously false.
But are they that exclusive? Are both two non-overlapping categories of thinking?
We have had several occasions before to explain that thinking is “the mental act of (1) putting into meaningful order (2) what one has already known in order to (3) attain what one is still ignorant of.”
It is clear that there are three central and constitutive elements embedded in such a description. One constituent, indicated by (2) above, is the units of knowledge already in one’s possession—what one already knows—which is regarded as the “material,” or “matter,” of thinking.
Another constituent, indicated by (1), is the way one mentally organizes those units of knowledge resulting in certain mental patterns, certain arrangements.
It is the way one mentally relates one unit with another unit, or a group of other units of knowledge, in such a manner to allow for new units of knowledge to become manifest.
This second constituent of thinking is thus considered to be the “form,” or “structure,” of thinking.
The third constituent represents the mental progress, indicated by (3) above, which is the successful movement of one’s mind to new units of knowledge (such as deriving right conclusions or making correct inferences or forming new ideas) after the first and second constituents above have been obtained.
In short, thinking is like one putting the right form to the right material so that one will arrive at the right product or result.
As such, defects in thinking may well be due to the defects in its material or its form, or to flaws in both.
If such is how thinking is understood and formulated, in what way is logical and creative thinking different from each other?
And how, if at all, are they related to each other?
Perhaps, one may explain them in terms of the manner one focuses on the result; should one be more concerned with the novelty of and in (3) above, then one is focused more on creativity; but if one is more preoccupied with the correctness or validity of and in (3) above, then one is focused more on logic.
Yet, one may want to be concerned with the novelty of and in (3) above as well as its correctness and validity; in such a case, at once one deals with both logic and creativity.