Abstract
What sort of contribution has Cognitive Science to offer to the understanding of creativity? Is it appropriate to investigate creative processes from a mechanistic perspective or do they involve subjective elements which cannot - in principle - be investigated from such a perspective? These two basic questions will guide this paper which investigates creativity focusing on the nature of abductive reasoning. As an initial hypothesis we characterize creativity as a self-organizing process in which abductive reasoning occurs allowing the expansion of well structured set of beliefs. This process is considered a part of the establishment of order parameters in the flow of information available to self-organizing systems. In this sense, we argue that a deeper understanding of how self-organizing processes involving abductive reasoning may take place in dynamic systems could assist Cognitive Science in its study of creativity.
