Epistemology and Creative Invention

Abstract

This paper describes social and epistemological models foreign to the area of creative psychology and applies them toward an analysis of a uniquely creative moment in prehistory, the origin of cave painting. The models presented have been used to study creative discovery in the history of science and in the thought of developing children. Kuhn’s model of scientific change as “revolution” ushered in by scientific crisis is used to understand the socio-cultural context in which the cultural revolution peculiar to Homo sapiens in Paleolithic Europe occurred. Piaget’s model of cognitive development is used to understand the cognitions that created the unparalleled images observed in the earliest known cave paintings and developed the manifest artistic practices. Although it is proposed that crisis kindled a social disruption which fostered the cultural transformation, the cognitive instruments, mechanisms, and processes humans use to construct knowledge are assumed to have operated uninterrupted and much as they do in present day humans. This assumption of functional continuity allowed exploration of the cognitive tools and generative processes evident in the cave images that Homo sapiens used to invent and evolve the domain we now call art. The application of these two models to what is known about the social context of the Upper Paleolithic period in which cave painting first emerged and to the cave paintings themselves is taken as a step toward a deeper contemplation of the question of how creative innovations in human thought develop.