RESEARCH TRAILS AND THE CREATIVE SPIRIT - CAN HISTORICAL CASE-STUDIESINTEGRATE THE SHORT AND LONG TIMESCALES OF CREATIVE ACTIVITY

In the study of scientific creativity, the purposes of cognitive scien tists and of historians of science overlap but are far from congruent. Historical cases are only one of many forms of evidence that cognitiv e scientists bring together to arrive at general conclusions about the creative processes. Historians seek to reconstruct the investigative enterprises of particular scientists. Generalizations about creativity are useful to historians mainly as one of various means to interpret the Work of those particular scientists. This article presents the arg ument that the extent to which these two goals can be complementary de pends largely (a) on how large the gap is between the duration of the thought processes that cognitive scientists examine and the limits of resolution to which historians can penetrate in following the temporal progression of a subject's thought and work and (b) on the level of t emporal organization of these thoughts and actions most revealing of t heir creative nature.