SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AS CREATIVE EXPLORATION - FARADAYS EXPERIMENTS

In this article, I address the distance between historical and psychol ogical approaches to creativity (particularly cognitive approaches). I argue that neither can get very far without the other, and I offer ex amples from the creative work of Michael Faraday, the eminent 19th-cen tury physicist These examples display similarities between the fine de tail of Faraday's creative work and the broad sweep of his development and illustrate the tension between historians' attention to particula r features of creativity and cognitive scientists' desire for general, preferably computable features. I conclude with a discussion of the d ifficult issue of finding a common language based on agreement about a ppropriate levels of abstraction.