Date of Award
Spring 2025
Thesis Type
Rollins Access Only
Degree Name
Honors Bachelor of Arts
Department
Philosophy
Sponsor
Dr. Ryan Bitetti Putzer
Committee Member
Dr. Eric Smaw
Committee Member
Dr. Jasser Jasser
Abstract
Creativity is traditionally regarded as a hallmark of human cognition—marked by its capacity for novelty, value, and resistance to mechanistic explanation. Long associated with spontaneity, intuition, and originality, it has anchored claims of human exceptionalism across artistic, scientific, and intellectual domains. Yet recent advances in artificial intelligence raise foundational questions about the nature of creativity and the epistemic conditions under which it might be attributed to machines, especially in the context of scientific discovery. This thesis offers a two-part investigation. The first develops a conceptual analysis of creativity as an epistemic predicate—a property of intellectual products that restructure explanatory frameworks, resolve anomalies, and enable new inferential pathways. Drawing on accounts of epistemology, scientific paradigms, and abductive reasoning, it situates scientific creativity within the context of conceptual change. The second part evaluates whether artificial systems can meet these criteria, analyzing three AI paradigms: symbolic systems (rule-governed), connectionist models (associative learning), and neurosymbolic architectures (integrated systems) are capable of modeling abduction, recognizing anomalies, and supporting conceptual change. The project delineates the structural, representational, and normative conditions under which creativity is meaningfully attributed, and assesses how far current AI systems approximate these. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and epistemology.
Recommended Citation
Manchanda, Jiya, "On the Possibility of Cre(AI)tive Scientists" (2025). Honors Program Theses. 261.
https://scholarship.rollins.edu/honors/261
Rights Holder
Jiya Manchanda