First conundrum: educators often view conflict as the problem child, the practitioner’s task as elimination of conflict.
On the other hand, students of creativity often view conflict as its necessary companion: (1) novelty engenders conflict and/or (2) creativity requires conflict.
Second conundrum: conflict resolution requires collaboration, if not as the goal then at least as the means.
Creative work has been treated, by and large, as an individual effort, sometimes painfully isolated.As an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, I learned from Solomon Asch, my teacher, about two interesting lines of research: his work on group pressures and his work with Witkin on frames of reference. Both of these bear on the issue of point of view, which is the major focus of this chapter. It has become clear to me, as to others, that an essential and almost omnipresent aspect of creative work is posing good questions. In studying Darwin’s notebooks and correspondence (Gruber, 1981) one sees that he gloried in discovering questions. He wrote many letters to scientists and naturalists around
The shadow box research, part of which is presented here, was supported by a grant to Howard E. Gruber from Le Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique, project numbers 1.043-084 and 1.738-087. Collaborators were Danielle Maurice, Emiel Reit, Isabelle Sehl, and Anastasia Tryphon. Some of the work was done while at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. I thank all of them and also thank Doris Wallace for her part in this project.
The material on the shadow box was liberally adapted from Gruber (1990). the world, posing challenging questions. His contemporaries were often mystified: Where did his questions come from? As a student, I adopted the position that having a novel point of view is the main thing. After all, among the contemporaries in question, then as now, were many good problem solvers—but where do their problems come from? Novel problems stem from a novel point of view.
Then the central question becomes: How is a novel point of view constructed?In his 1996 book, Human Judgment and Social Policy, Kenneth Hammond distinguishes between theories of truth, which center on the correspondence of ideas with facts, and theories that look inward for coherence of ideas with other ideas. The latter, coherence theories, do not offer definite procedures for making judgments and consequently must rely on wisdom and intuition. Correspondence theories do so provide, but in a world teeming with uncertainties there is a triple price to be paid—which Hammond (1996) sums up beautifully in the subtitle of his book: Irreducible Uncertainty, Inevitable Error, Unavoidable Injustice. In both existing and historically experienced circumstances, this view casts a pretty dark shadow. My chosen topic, however, is not judgment but its necessary prelude, discovering or inventing the alternatives to be judged and among which to choose. Here, what is needed is not so much accuracy or logic but creative imagination and construction.
In this chapter, I give a brief account of the evolving systems approach to creative work, with special emphasis on point of view and social aspects of creativity. In addition, I explore some possible relations between creativity and conflict resolution, presenting experimental work with a “shadow box” designed to illuminate collaborative synthesis of disparate points of view.