Revolution with Creativity

Abstract

Since Thomas Kuhn (1962) introduced the new value in 1962 -”paradigm” - in history and philosophy of science, the situation that traditional science had been in the war against sociology, arts, and politics, which lasted for many years, had entered a new age (Sardar, Z., 2000). Kuhn himself was a physicist before he became a researcher in history and philosophy of science. His doctrine, which created a new ”paradigm,” aroused sharp criticism from other traditional science researchers at the same period. However, many researchers of sociology, arts and humanities started to use Kuhn's new ”paradigm” as the principle for their researches and thinking. ”Paradigm,” as a ”pioneer” concept in historical and philosophical researches, would definitely encounter many endorsements and critiques. (Kuhn himself didn't admit that paradigm was a ”pioneer” concept and pointed out that it originated from the researches in arts, humanity, and social science.) Therefore, it should be corrected more completely and deeply. Kuhn once put his focus on the relationship between science and art, and he analyzed the similarities and differences between the development of science and art in the essay -”Comment on the Relations of Science and Art.” However, the situation has changed, and a lot of ideas and concepts are now ”shifting” on paradigm (even the concept ”paradigm” itself is shifting too.). Several parts in his essay that are mentioned above are not exactly precise and correct. Thus I'm going to try new angles to analyze these issues and discuss the phenomenon and concepts of post-modem art in this essay. From the views of visual art, the researches and related issues on ”Creativity” in psychology of art have been hot during these 20 or 30 years. Up to now, people in several research fields, such as educational psychology, developmental psychology, or artificial intelligence, can hardly neglect the importance of the research achievements on these issues. What's more interesting is, art psychologist ”Csikszentmihalyi” (1988) published an essay in 1988: ”Society, culture, and person: a system's view of creativity,” and the idea in his essay was similar to Kuhn's concept. Both of them analyzed the development with a system's view on society and culture. In his essay, he used many examples to illustrate the developmental process of art, and how the revolution of ”creativity” works, and he also used his famous ”dynamic model” to illustrate this process. In this essay, I would like to discuss his issue and compare the process in that dynamic model with Kuhn's concepts of ”paradigm shifts”. Besides, I would like to find out the Position of ”paradigm” in this model. That is one of my research purposes in this essay. Furthermore, I am very interested in the relationship between post-modem science and art. When the development of the ”normal” theory meets the uncertainty in development of societies and cultures, many possibilities will make these two fields interact more frequently. Take contemporary art for example, the role that science and technology play becomes so important that people start to wonder where the ”value” of art is. Photography became one of the branches in art creation, and many ideas are now shifting in contemporary digital art and tech-art. The impact from reproduction and the contradiction in mass culture shorten the distance between science and art. Many ideas against tradition are changing. I would like to use higher levels and angles to discuss the evolution processes of these opposite ideas in my next essay: ”The Mystery of Pairs”. Thus, another purpose of this essay is to do the works of basic review and analysis.