Creative Action: The Chance-configuration Theory and Beyond
In 2019, I found CALL (Creative Action Learning Lab) as a personal studio for my independent knowledge discovery. From Oct 2020 to Oct 2021. I run CALL as a knowledge curation studio that produced a set of knowledge frameworks and built an ecology of ideas.
The primary theme of CALL is Creative Action. Originally, it referred to my approach to creativity research: the “Process as Product” approach. You can find more details in The NICE Way and Creative Actions.
Later, it led to the Path of Creative Life and a series of possible books: Aspects of Creative Life. See the diagram below.
In 2022, I developed a new structure of units of analysis:
- Creative Actions
- Creative Projects
- Creative Journey
- Creative Dialogue
- Creative Landscape
- Creative Lifescope
You can find more details in Creative Life Curation: Turning Experiences into Meaningful Achievements. All units of analysis are related to a method called Significant Insights Analysis.
Today I am going to discuss a new insight called “Dance” which is a meta-diagram I made in the past two weeks. Moreover, I will introduce a term called Mental Elements and a related theory: The Chance-configuration Theory.
A mental element called “Dance”
In the past two months, I worked on the TALE project. TALE stands for Thematic Analysis Learning Lab. As a new knowledge center, TALE aims to host the Thematic Engagement project and build a community around thematic innovations.
In January, I worked with Daiana Zavate on a thematic conversation project about “Strategic Exploration”.
In February, I worked on connecting my theoretical approaches with Product-based Business Development. The outcome is a new possible book titled Perspectives on Product Engagement (v1.0).
In addition, I also worked with a friend on a private thematic conversation project about “Mental Tendency”.
In the journey of thematic engagement, I discovered a meta-diagram and named it “Dance”. See the diagram below.
You can see the journey of developing “Dance” in the diagram below. The next article will use this diagram for a case study.
I’d like to adopt the term “mental elements” from Dean Keith Simonton’s Chance-configuration theory (Scientific Genius,1988) to name this new insight.
What are mental elements?
According to Simonton, “In scientific creativity, the predominant mental elements are cognitions of some kind, such as facts, principles, relations, rules, laws, formulae, and images. Yet immediate sensations may also play a role in laboratory experimentation and field exploration, and feelings may figure in scientific thought and discourse as well (Mahoney 1976). Sometimes these mental elements can be evoked voluntarily (e.g., the deliberate retrieval of a stored fact from memory); at other times these elements enter mental processing involuntarily (e.g., via a conditioned emotional association). Moreover, these mental elements do not have to be fully conscious, but rather, many enter information processing at the periphery of consciousness. ” (1988, p.6)
I highlight some keywords from Simonton’s description of mental elements. It looks like this is a rough definition. And, it is very hard to give an accurate definition for such things.
Last year, I used a metaphor called “Sparks” for discussing Developing Tacit Knowledge. You can find more details in the following articles:
- Thematic Space: Sparks In, Statue Out
- Slow Cognition: The Spark Space Canvas
- Thematic Space: How to Record a Spark?
- Thematic Space: Some Sparks for the “Infoniche” thematic space
“Sparks” and “Mental Elements” are perfect for the “Creative Actions” level because some outcomes of creative actions are not important for a creative project or a creative journey, but they are useful resources for creative operations.
I am going to directly use “Mental Elements” to discuss such useful creative resources, especially developing mental elements by taking Attachances.
The Chance-configuration theory
In 2019, I wrote a chapter discussing knowledge curation in the book Curativity. For academic knowledge curation, I mentioned Dean Keith Simonton’s chance-configuration theory, Victor Kaptelinin, and Bonnie A. Nardi’s scientific curation case study “curation at Ajaxe”, and qualitative research.
It’s time to introduce the Change-configuration theory again but from the perspective of Attachance.
I coined the term Attachance by combining Attach and Chance in 2018 in order to discuss some ideas related to the concept of Affordance which is a core idea of Ecological Psychology.
Affordance means potential action opportunities offered by environments. I want to highlight the meaning and value of actual action itself, however, the term Affordance only refers to potential actions. Thus, I coined the term Attachance to emphasize the potential opportunities offered by actual actions, especially the attaching act and the detaching act.
From knowledge curation and knowledge creation, the attaching act and the detaching act are about moving mental elements between thematic spaces. Thus, the Chance-configuration theory is a great starting point for our discussion.
The root of the Chance-configuration theory is Donald Campbell’s (1960) blind-variation and selective-retention model of creative thought (BVSR). The BVSR model can be summarized as the following three core propositions (pp.3–4):
- The acquisition of new knowledge, the solution to novel problems, requires some means of producing variation. Campbell argues that this variation, to be truly effective, must be fully blind.
- These heterogeneous variations are subjected to a consistent selection process that winnows out all but those that exhibit adaptive fit.
- The variations that have been selected must be preserved and reproduced by some mechanism; without such retention, a successful variation cannot represent a permanent contribution to adaptive fitness.
Dean Keith Simonton’s theory is built with the following similar ideas:
- The chance permutation of mental elements
- The formation of configurations
- The communication, social acceptance, and sociocultural preservation of those configurations.
The third idea is not relevant to the present discussion, we will focus on the first idea and the second idea. See the diagram below.
Why does Dean Keith Simonton choose the term permutation, not the term combination? He wants to emphasize how selected mental elements are arranged. However, the term combination only considers sets of elements that have no particular order.
How do we decide which chance permutations can or should be retained? According to Dean Keith Simonton, “the primary selection procedure is predicated on the fact that chance permutations vary appreciably in stability.” (p.8)
- These unstable permutations we may call mental aggregates.
- These stable permutations are labeled with configurations.
In fact, we should see these two are members of a continuum. What does the term configurations mean?
The root of configuration is a Latin word meaning “to shape after some pattern.” A configuration is thus a conformation or structural arrangement of entities and implies that the relative disposition of these entities is central to the configuration’s identity. (p.8)
One interesting thing is that a sufficiently refined configuration can become a new mental element that can enter into further permutations. Thus, we see a cycle model.
If the diverse elements that make up the configuration become strongly connected, they all will become “chunked” so that they function as a single element, taking up less space in limited attention. (p.9)
There are two types of configurations, one is Posteriori Configurations and the other one is Priori Configurations. What’s the difference between these two?
Dean Keith Simonton points out that a Posteriori Configuration derives from experience and it establishes a correspondence between perceived events and their cognitive representations. (p.10) In contrast, a Priori Configuration emerges from given conventions. These conventions define a set of mental elements and the rules by which these elements can be combined into a proper order. (p.11)
So far, what we learned from Dean Keith Simonton is a view on creativity from the perspective of information-processing which is a popular theoretical tradition of cognition science.
The third point of the theory is about communication and acceptance. This section echoes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Systems Model of Creativity. You can find more details in my article The NICE Way and Creative Actions.
Configurations and Containers
I really like the Chance-configuration theory because it can be used to explain creative cognition. However, it only focuses on the head without considering the environment.
I’d like to adopt the concept of Attachance and the Ecological Practice Approach to expand the Chance-configuration theory. In a broad sense, the Ecological Practice approach has its philosophical roots in traditional Pragmatism and contemporary embodied cognitive science. The diagram below shows the germ cell of the Ecological Practice approach.
The above diagram combines three core concepts of the Ecological Practice approach together: Affordance, Attachance, and Containance. The term “Offers” is an affordance-inspired concept, it refers to opportunities afforded by the Container. The group of “Offer — Act” forms “Event” which changes the status of the Container. The new status of the Container affords new opportunities which guide new acts and events.
Based on the concept of Container, I coined two related ideas: Network and Platform. The Network refers to the pre-container status which means pieces loose coupling outside the container. The Platform refers to the post-container status which means pieces loose coupling within the super large container. These three ideas form a triad: Network — Container — Platform. I consider the triad as the basic form of collective contexts.
Now we can compare the Chance-configuration theory with Attachance Theory.
- Mental Elements : A Network of Pieces
- Chance Permutations : Container (Pieces)
- Configuration Formation: Platform (Pieces)
I use “:” instead of “=” because this is a rough analogy. However, it seems that doesn’t offer us new values and meanings.
Another way to associate these two approaches is to use the following formula:
Container [Configuration (Mental Elements)]
We use the concept of “Container” to expand the Chance-configuration theory. In fact, this is the original model of Curativity Theory.
In my 2019 book Curativity, I use the concept of Curatorial Configuration as an umbrella concept and it refers to various academic concepts such as Cognitive Schemas, Cultural Schemas, Activity Patterns, Behavior Settings, Social Episodes, Situated Types, etc. You can find more details in Curativity Theory and The Ecological Practice Approach (v2, 2020) and Curativity Theory: Table of Contents and Related Articles.
Curativity Theory adopts James Gibson’s “Affordance”, George Lakoff’s “Container” and Donald Schön’s “Reflection” as epistemological tools. The diagram below shows the basic elements of Curativity: Pieces — Container — Whole. The basic assumption behind the diagram and the new term is: “In order to effectively curate pieces into a meaningful whole, we need containers to contain pieces and shape them.”
What’s a Container?
The concept of Container is inspired by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor Container and image schema Containment.
According to Mark Johnson (1987), “If we look for common structure in our many experiences of being in something, or for locating something within another thing, we find recurring organization of structures: the experiential basis for in-out orientation is that of spatial boundedness. The most experientially salient sense of boundedness seems to be that of three-dimensional containment (i.e., being limited or held within some three-dimensional enclosure, such as a womb, a crib, or a room).” He also pointed out there are at least five important entailments or consequences of these recurring experiential image-schematic structures for in-out orientation. (pp.21–22)
Physical containers and non-physical containers can work together in order to explain complex curating activities. For example, the picture below shows a scene of playing. Two months ago, my two sons played a rock game outdoors. From the perspective of Curativity Theory, there are three containers, 1) the land, 2) the rock-man picture, and 3) the game.
Another example is the picture below which shows two wood blocks. Here we see two containers, one is the desktop which is a physical container and another is the word “AI” which is a linguistic container.
The concept of Nested Containers expands the scope of Curativity Theory from the physical level to non-physical levels.
The Power of Attchances
While Curativity Theory is about curating pieces into containers in order to turn pieces into a meaningful whole, Attachance Theory is about the ecological meaning and value of detaching acts and attaching acts. In other words, we pay attention to the process of moving between containers.
The above discussion offered us a model for understanding creative actions.
Container [Configuration (Mental Elements)]
For the knowledge engagement project and the thematic engagement project in general, we pay attention to Thematic Spaces which are a specific type of container.
Moreover, we can use the concept of “Nested Containers” to define several containers for case studies. For example, we can find the following three types of containers from my journey of working on TALE.
- Projects: social containers
- Thematic Spaces: cognitive containers
- Digital Platforms: physical containers
We can make a new model for discussing Container [Configuration (Mental Elements)]. See the diagram below.
- Each project corresponds to a thematic space.
- Each project is supported by a digital platform.
- A mental element can move between two thematic spaces.
Now we can focus on Attachance Theory and pay attention to the moving between these three types of containers.
In this way, we are going to discover the power of Attachances for creative cognition.
The next article will return to the story of “Dance” and use the model to conduct a case study.
