A theory of creative understanding

   

Understanding is a lot like sex. It has a practical purpose but that's not why people do it normally.
-Frank Oppenheimer

For comprehension to occur, the concepts which are given to the reasoner must be understood. As I stated in the last chapter, understanding will result in the new concepts ``making sense'' within the larger conceptual framework which already exists in the reasoner. The closer a new concept is to something already known (which can be retrieved), the more straightforward the understanding process will be. To illustrate this, consider the concept of tocsin. This concept should be novel to most of the readers of this work, so, I will provide a definition of it, by describing a situation which involves it: A tocsin is something which you would want to foozle if you ever mirared a baloo. Of course, you would not automatically want to foozle upon miraring a baloo; it might be the case that the baloo is calaporatory, which would eliminate the need to foozle.

This conceptual definition raises a crucial point in my research--it is impossible to understand a concept which is completely novel to a reasoner. Several of the words in the prior paragraph are imaginary; others are either English words which have fallen into non-use, or variations of foreign words. Since none of the key concepts in the definition are known to the reasoner, the definition makes little sense. Without some level of conceptual grounding, understanding is impossible.   This is the ex nihilo nihil fit problem of creativity--from nothing, nothing is produced.

What this means in the theory of creative understanding is that when I speak of understanding novel concepts, I always mean novel concepts which in some way can be related to the existing concepts which a reasoner possesses. If this was not the case, if the concepts which were being understood have no grounding in what the reasoner already knows, then there could be no understanding at all. With this realization, it becomes possible to examine the types of novelty which can be handled with respect to precisely how each type will be handled by the reasoner. The first of my creative understanding claims to approach is that     THE INTEGRATION OF MEMORY RETRIEVAL, ANALOGICAL MAPPING, BASE-CONSTRUCTIVE ANALOGY, AND PROBLEM REFORMULATION ARE SUFFICIENT AND NECESSARY FOR THE UNDERSTANDING OF NOVEL CONCEPTS.