The play of creativity: the function of iconic signs in thought

Abstract

Creativity manifests itself as a productive capacity of thought, expressing flexibility and originality when approaching challenges and unusual situations. Innovative ideas seem to emerge spontaneously, being considered intuitions. Peirce criticized the Cartesian idea of ​​intuition, understood as any cognition not resulting from previous cognition processes that could serve as premises for deductions. For Peirce, knowledge is derived from external facts, apprehended by perception and processed through inferences mediated by signs, resulting from combinations of previous cognitions derived from previous judgments of experience. Although the apparent spontaneity of creative thought, which Peirce called abductive, does not seem to result from previous inferences, his conceptual framework demonstrates how creative thought works. Hence, this article seeks to evince: (a) that creative thought results from abductive inferential chains, whose premises are apprehended through perception; (b) that such premises are processed at a more or less unconscious level; (c) that these premises are iconic signs or present a high degree of iconicity, a type of mediation where predominate vagueness and openness inherent to the category of firstness; and (d) that it is possible to seek and use these signs capable of reflecting the unknown reality through human cognitive capacity, immersed in the phenomenal world.