Mike Schneider (University of Missouri)

Deliberately Uncreative

Seminarium

Datum:

torsdag 16 oktober 2025

Tid:

13.15 – 15.00

Plats:

D700

Abstract

Science depends on creativity. This talk is about material from my current book project, concerning how to understand the concept of creativity in science, such that the previous declaration is 1) true, but 2) noteworthy rather than trivial, and 3) in keeping with a philosopher's interest in methodology (studying the dynamics of the growth of scientific knowledge by means of studying the game that scientists play).

The main claim of the book is that creativity in science may be understood fruitfully in terms of an intervention that occurs during scientific speculation within the course of research, which amounts to the scientists involved overcoming uncreativity in their speculating.

This, in the first place, requires an answer to an unusual question: when does speculating count as uncreatively done?  In this talk, I will focus on the argument contained in the linchpin middle chapter of the book, “An account of uncreativity”, where this crucial question gets answered. In this chapter, a case demonstrates the account: the unseriousness of the proposal in fundamental physics that spacetime might fail to be time-orientable. (As will be discussed, this case is selected specifically to further emphasize that sometimes, uncreativity is just fine.)