functional theory approach to problem solving

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From Something Old to Something New: Functionalist Lessons for the Cognitive Science of Scientific Creativity

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The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

An intuitive view is that creativity involves bringing together what is already known and familiar in a way that produces something new. In cognitive science, this intuition is typically formalized in terms of computational processes that combine or associate internally represented information. From this computationalist perspective, it is hard to imagine how non-representational approaches in embodied cognitive science could shed light on creativity, especially when it comes to abstract conceptual reasoning of the kind scientists so often engage in. The present article offers an entry point to addressing this challenge. The scientific project of embodied cognitive science is a continuation of work in the functionalist tradition in psychology developed over a century ago by William James and John Dewey, among others. The focus here is on how functionalist views on the nature of mind, thought , and experience offer an alternative starting point for cognitive science in general, and for the cognitive science of scientific creativity in particular. The result may seem paradoxical. On the one hand, the article claims that the functionalist conceptual framework motivates rejecting mainstream cognitive views of creativity as the combination or association of ideas. On the other hand, however, the strategy adopted here—namely, revisiting ideas from functionalist psychology to inform current scientific theorizing—can itself be described as a process of arriving at new, creative ideas from combinations of old ones. As is shown here, a proper understanding of cognition in light of the functionalist tradition resolves the seeming tension between these two claims.

1. Introduction

Innovative design often involves combining previously separate features or functions into a single new product. Obvious examples include simple 2-in-1 products, such as the shampoo/conditioner combo, the washing machine with a built-in dryer, and the versatile baby car seat that transforms into a stroller. This is also the case with multi-functional (i.e., many-in-one) products, such as current cellphones: in addition to making phone calls, the smartphone also acts as a camera, GPS device, calculator, alarm clock, internet browser, and more. What was creative about products like these when they were first invented was not that they did something entirely novel that did not exist previously: rather, their originality lies in bringing together in a single object different uses that were already well known but which had previously been separate from one another.

From a psychological standpoint, creativity is frequently described in a similar fashion as relating to the production of novelty out of what was already familiar. Some researchers have emphasized the role of personality traits in lowering barriers to creative behaviors: different levels of openness, extraversion, nonconformity, impulsivity, and persistence, for instance, might increase the likelihood of diverging from more familiar behaviors or increase the occurrence of unusual associations (refer to, e.g., Batey and Furnham, 2006 ; Feist, 2010 , 2019 for detailed reviews). Other researchers have emphasized social psychological factors contributing to creative performance, including evaluation by others and expectations of future evaluation, the availability of rewards, and access to role models to draw from in generating original behavioral variations (refer to, e.g., Hennessey, 2003 , 2010 ; Amabile et al., 2018 ). From a specifically cognitive focus, research on imagination has shown that when we try to come up with a completely novel member of a given category, properties that are typical for members of that category tend to structure our imagination (Ward, 1994 ; Ward et al., 1999 ; Ward and Kolomyts, 2010 ). Even when we cannot trace the origin of a new thought, idea, or behavior, the process underlying creative insight is usually assumed to involve some kind of combining or associating prior knowledge in a new way rather than actually coming up with something completely novel out of thin air. As Thomas Ward puts it, “Clearly, ideas do not arise in a vacuum, and there is a trivial sense in which we must always rely on some type of stored information when we develop any new idea” (Ward, 1995 , p. 157–158).

The present article is concerned with evaluating this intuitive view of creativity in terms of combinations or associations, even in this supposedly trivial sense. The special focus is on how the combinatorial view figures in the cognitive science of science , that is, in the application of theories and methods from cognitive science toward investigating cognitive phenomena at play in scientific practice itself. The dominant paradigm in cognitive science is to understand the mind in terms of the internal knowledge structures and procedures that mediate between perceptual inputs and behavioral outputs (refer to, e.g., Neisser, 1967/2014 ; Marr, 1982 ; Fodor, 1983 ; Pinker, 1997 ; Thagard, 2005 , 2019 ; Boden, 2008 ; Clark, 2014 ). Along these lines, cognitive explanations of scientific practice have tended to emphasize the role of mental representations and computational information-manipulating procedures in enabling the individual scientist to generate new knowledge (refer to, e.g., Gholson et al., 1989 ; Gopnik, 1996 ; Carruthers et al., 2002 ; Feist, 2008 ; Nersessian, 2008 ; Feist and Gorman, 2012 ; Thagard, 2012 ).

In parallel with the dominant computational-representational approach, an increasingly popular alternative understands cognition as an embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and ecological phenomenon (refer to, e.g., Gibson, 1979 ; Maturana and Varela, 1980 ; Varela et al., 1991 ; Clark, 1998 , 2003 , 2008 ; Calvo and Gomila, 2008 ; Chemero, 2009 ; Menary, 2010 ; Shapiro, 2010 , 2014 ; Di Paolo et al., 2017 ; Gallagher, 2017 ; Newen et al., 2018 ). This diverse research tradition, referred to as embodied cognitive science or “4E cognition” for short, is widely recognized (even by critics) as being very successful in explaining non-representationally so-called “lower-level” behaviors, which includes, for instance, accounts of how we navigate cluttered environments without collision or how we catch balls and other moving targets, all in terms of real-time perception-action coupling. But, embodied cognitive science appears to face a problem. This is the problem of “scaling up” non-representational, embodied explanations so that they can also make sense of what has been referred to as “representation-hungry” processes, i.e., processes that seem to require explanation in terms of internal representations, such as abstract conceptual thinking, logical reasoning, imagination, memory, and language (Clark and Toribio, 1994 ; Chemero, 2009 ; Gallagher, 2017 ; Sanches de Oliveira et al., 2021 ).

The scaling-up problem presents a challenge for embodied cognitive science in general, but it can also seem to pose a special barrier for the application of the embodied approach in the cognitive science of science. This is because scientific practice exhibits all of the main characteristics that are usually considered to be problematic for embodied, non-representational approaches to cognition. No doubt, scientists use their bodies to interact with parts of the world that are readily available for perception, as is clear, for instance, in operating equipment to conduct experiments and collect data. But even in these cases, scientific work is unavoidably tangled in a complex web of meaning that seems paradigmatically “representation hungry,” involving reasoning about entities that are not immediately available for real-time perception and that perhaps could not even possibly be available in that way, such as in the case of abstract concepts.

This is the issue that the present paper is ultimately concerned with, namely, examining the view of creativity as a combination or association with an eye to determining how it might fit in the broader project of approaching scientific practice from the perspective of embodied cognitive science. Embodied cognitive science is sometimes treated by critics as a new trend, and the canonical references cited above, mostly from the past couple of decades, illustrate the focus on recent research. In fact, however, embodied cognitive science is rooted in work in the functionalist tradition extending all the way back to the late 19th century and the origins of psychology as a distinct scientific discipline (Heft, 2001 ; Crippen and Schulkin, 2020 ). By exploring these functionalist roots of embodied cognitive science, the goal here is to find a new way of understanding creativity that makes it more amenable to explanation in non-representational, embodied terms. Section 2 reviews how, within the computational-representational paradigm, scientific creativity is understood in terms of combination and association. Section 3 examines some of the key elements making up the functionalist approach to psychology as developed by William James and John Dewey. Section 4 then traces out implications of those aspects of the functionalist paradigm for thinking about creativity, especially in science, from the perspective of embodied cognitive science. As its functionalist roots make clear, embodied cognitive science is more than just a local theory limited to “lower-level” cognitive phenomena: rather, it is a comprehensive approach capable of advancing our understanding of all of cognition, including even phenomena of interest for the cognitive science of science.

2. Creativity in Computational-Representational Cognitive Science

2.1. the newell, shaw, and simon model and the foundations of computational-representational cognitive science.

Cognitive approaches to creativity are about as old as cognitive science itself. If the year 1956 is taken as the birth of cognitive science (Miller, 2003 ), it would only be another couple of years until Newell et al. ( 1958/1962 ) offered an early example of a computational approach to creative thinking. They described their approach as follows: “we would have a satisfactory theory of creative thought if we could design and build some mechanisms that could think creatively (exhibit behavior just like that of a human carrying on creative activity), and if we could state the general principles on which the mechanisms were built and operated” (Newell et al., 1958/1962 , p. 64). While recognizing that the programs they described fell short from the level of sophistication and complexity characteristic of human creativity, the authors held that the processes at play were of the same type: their working hypothesis was that “creative thinking is simply a special kind of problem-solving behavior” (p. 65) and, however simple, the candidate explanations they offered were “qualitatively of the same genus as these more complex human problem-solving processes” (p. 116). In their view, effective problem solving is a matter of employing “search” strategies that narrow down the entire “problem space” and enable finding acceptable solutions within a restricted time frame. The key to making sense of problem-solving behavior that is effective in a creative manner, then, lies in considering the “system of heuristics possessed by the problem-solver” (p. 104). In many cases, when strategies that have been useful in the past prove unsuccessful for dealing with new situations, a problem-solver will be “more likely to succeed if his repertoire of heuristics includes the injunction: ‘If at first you don't succeed, try something counter-intuitive'" (p. 105). Consequently, while in some cases, a creative solution can be found by employing a combination of different heuristics, in other instances it might require “generat[ing] new heuristics to fill the vacuums created by the rejection of the ones previously used” (p. 107).

The focus of this section will be on a different, more recent cognitive account of creativity. Still, starting with Newell, Shaw, and Simon's account is instructive for two reasons.

The first reason has to do with the view of creativity at play in their account. The brief summary given above emphasized their goal of explaining how problem-solving behavior can be creative, namely depending on the heuristics that problem solvers know and use. But although their focus was explicitly on the ‘how' of creativity, they did not ignore the “what” question: for them, this was the question of what makes a given problem solution creative in the first place. Synthesizing the prior psychological literature and bringing it to the nascent domain of cognitive science, Newell, Shaw, and Simon identify four criteria each of which they thought sufficed to make a solution count as creative: “creative activity appears simply to be a special class of problem-solving activity characterized by novelty, unconventionality, persistence, and difficulty in problem formulation” (p. 66). Contemporary work tends to emphasize novelty and unconventionality without seeing persistence and difficulty as nearly as important. Along these lines, for instance, Margaret Boden offers the following characterization: “Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas or artifacts that are new, surprising, and valuable” (Boden, 2004 , p. 1). Boden also adds—without reference to Newell, Shaw and Simon, but clearly in agreement with them—that creativity is not a sui generis process, “not a special “faculty” but an aspect of human intelligence in general” (ibid.). Newell, Shaw, and Simon's inclusion of persistence and difficulty is likely motivated by their attention to creative innovation in highly skilled activities in science and technology: as they propose, these require “motivation” to sustain specialized activities “either over a considerable span of time (continuously or intermittently) or at high intensity” (p. 65) and sometimes problems in these specialized domains are “vague and ill-defined, so that part of the task was to formulate the problem itself,” which can be difficult (p. 66). But even Newell, Shaw, and Simon's description of novelty was prescient: in their view, the first criterion for creative problem-solving is that “The product of the thinking has novelty and value (either for the thinker or for his culture)” (p. 65). In this, they seem to anticipate a distinction that would be drawn much later between the “P-creative” and the “H-creative,” that is, between that which is innovative for an individual yet may not be innovative for others and that which is historically innovative, or novel for all (Boden, 1990 , 2004 ; see also, e.g., Nersessian, 2008 ).

Relatedly, but beyond the specific topic of creativity, a second reason for the relevance of their account for the purposes of this article is that the main theoretical commitments they articulated have remained by and large the same in contemporary cognitive science. What is key here is the assumption that providing a cognitive explanation of some phenomenon amounts to providing an explanation in computational-representational terms . Newell, Shaw, and Simon propose: “In order for us to think about something, that something must have an internal representation of some kind, and the thinking organism must have some processes that are capable of manipulating the representation” (Newell et al., 1958/1962 , p. 102). The assumption here is that the mind trades in representations of the external world: through perception, we obtain information from the environment, and intelligent behavior arises from manipulating those internal information structures. In some cases, information processing is for planning and executing motor actions that involve continued contact with the environment and typically require further sensory feedback. In other cases, information processing is for engaging in more purely intellectual activities, such as when we think about objects that are no longer present externally and that, presumably, must therefore remain accessible in the form of internally-stored mental representations. In either case, according to this view, a proper understanding of mind and behavior calls for description in terms of computational procedures and the manipulation of internal representations or information structures.

If this way of understanding mind and behavior sounds uncontroversial, that is precisely because the work by people like Newell, Shaw, and Simon helped establish this as the standard way of doing cognitive science. Foreshadowing Marr's ( 1982 ) influential distinction between levels of description, in this early paper on creativity Newell et al. ( 1958/1962 , p. 98) already indicate how the project of computational-representational explanation is seen as independent from research on what goes on in the brain: “We are asking here neither a physiological nor a ‘hardware' question. We wish an answer at the level of information processing, rather than at that of neurology or electronics.” Exclusive focus on explanation at the cognitive level without any regard at all to advances in neuroscience is increasingly less common today: for the past couple of decades, cognitive science continues to be “pulled vertically down into the brain,” as Bechtel et al. ( 1998/2017 ) put it. But the nature of this shift toward closer contact between cognitive and neural explanations is illuminating. To a large extent, this shift has been possible not so much because, through contact with neuroscientific research, cognitive scientists have begun reconceptualizing cognition in neurophysiological terms—on the contrary, the shift is for the most part due to the increasing popularity of conceptualizations of the brain and neural processes in computational-representational terms (refer to endorsements as well as critical discussions in, e.g., Posner et al., 1988 ; Sejnowski et al., 1988 ; Barlow, 1994 ; Boden, 2008 ; Neske, 2010 ; Piccinini and Bahar, 2013 ; Anderson, 2014 ; Gazzaniga, 2014 ; Brette, 2019 ). The assumption that we find already in Newell, Shaw, and Simon's work and that remains widespread today is that, whatever it does, physiologically speaking, the brain can be adequately understood as engaging in storing and processing information. It was by building upon the foundation of this computational-representational theoretical assumption that the contemporary cognitive neuroscientific project of understanding creativity could become equated to “the question of how brains compute creative ideas” (Dietrich and Haider, 2017 , p. 2).

2.2. Thagard's Neurocomputational Account of Scientific Creativity

Paul Thagard's approach to creativity, including scientific creativity, exhibits important similarities and dissimilarities to the one by Newell, Shaw, and Simon. Conceptually, Thagard's account agrees in highlighting the role of novelty, surprise, and value in creativity: in his view, something (say, a behavior, a concept or a product) is creative when it is original, when it is unexpected because not obvious, and when it is considered useful and important (Thagard, 2019 ). Theoretically, Thagard also approaches creativity from a computational-representational perspective and focuses on the “how” question of understanding the information-processing mechanisms involved in the generation of creative outputs. Still, his account differs significantly from the one by Newell, Shaw, and Simon because, in line with the recent developments just described, Thagard's project embraces the more recent idea that the computational-representational framework can be a way of integrating cognitive and neural explanations rather than divorcing the two. Given this, a more fundamental difference lies in the specific mechanism posited to explain creativity. Unlike Newell, Shaw, and Simon's focus on problem solving and on the “creative” as a feature of some problem solutions, Thagard's focus is more general, not limited to problem solving but encompassing other kinds of behaviors and activities understood in reference to neural processes.

This more fundamental difference is made clear by Thagard's claim that he sees “the problem of creative combination of representations as an instance of the ubiquitous ‘binding problem' that pervades cognitive neuroscience” (Thagard, 2012 , p. 114). Put briefly, the binding problem is the problem of explaining how we integrate multiple sensory inputs, even from different sensory modalities, into unified representations. In typing these very words, for instance, I feel the keys at the tip of my fingers, I hear the sound of each key press, and I see the letters show up in succession on the screen. And yet, each of these sensory inputs (tactile, auditory and visual) goes on unnoticed—or at least they did until I started writing this example—and the whole situation unfolds smoothly as I have a single coherent experience of the world rather than a jumble of disjointed sensations. This applies even for a single sensory modality. Focusing on vision, Thagard explains: “Recognizing objects requires combinations of features” such that, when a monkey recognizes a banana, that recognition involves binding “[d]ifferent neural groups [that] serve to encode different features of bananas, such as yellow, long, and round” much like the binding of features such as nose, eyes, and mouth when you recognize a friend's face (Thagard, 2019 , p. 26). The binding problem, then, is the problem of understanding how this happens. The problem matters for us precisely because, again, in Thagard's account the binding of distinct representations explains not only the unity and coherence of ordinary experience but also the occurrence of behaviors and concepts that are novel, surprising, and valuable, that is, that are creative: as he puts it, “representation combination” or binding “is the fundamental mechanism of creativity in various domains” (Thagard, 2012 , p. 142).

Thagard's account is based on what he calls the “combinatorial conjecture,” which he describes as the view that “All creativity results from convolution-based combination of mental representations consisting of patterns of firing in neural populations” (Thagard, 2012 , p. 142). The account can thus be understood in light of two distinctions, the first between combinatorial models and non-combinatorial alternatives, and the second between combinatorial models that are based on convolution and combinatorial models that are not.

First, in endorsing the combinatorial conjecture, Thagard ( 2012 ) explicitly opposes the alternative view that, rather than involving the combination of different representations, a creative idea is the result of blind variations on a single concept or representation. As he explains, this kind of view is generally inspired by an analogy to evolutionary processes in biology: just as new adaptive biological features arise through random genetic mutations, so are original and useful concepts supposed to arise through mutation or blind variation on prior versions of individual concepts. A more specific target of Thagard's ( 2012 ) criticism is the view developed by Simonton ( 2010 ) as a reworking of Campbell's ( 1960 ) blind-variation and selective-retention (BVSR) model of creativity (refer to, e.g., Simonton, 1999 , 2011 , 2013 , 2018 ). After examining Simonton's model, Thagard suggests that, even accounting for the role of serendipity and unforeseen developments, scientific discoveries can never be entirely blind. In Thagard's example, although Galileo may not have had the intention to discover the moons of Jupiter, still “his interests, background knowledge, and cognitive processes made it more probable that” upon turning his telescope in the right direction “he would generate the representation ‘Jupiter has moons”' compared to the probability of generating “some utterly useless representation such as ‘Rome has toes' ” (Thagard, 2012 , p. 157). This leads Thagard to the conclusion that blind variation cannot be the mechanism for creativity: “discovery is not blind, and biological evolution is a poor model for scientific discovery and other kinds of creativity” (Thagard, 2012 , p. 157).

A sticking point for Thagard, therefore, seems to be the notion of “blindness” at play in the BVSR view. Interestingly, however, Simonton explicitly states that blindness does not equate to randomness: “Although all random variations are inexorably blind, blind variations are not inevitably random, and are actually seldom so” (Simonton, 2010 , p. 157). Elsewhere Simonton explains that blindness does not consist in the “equiprobability for all possible alternatives” (Simonton, 1999 , p. 312); rather, blindness more simply suggests that the variation is not sighted in the sense of being informed or guided by the probability of the variation's success. This suggests that Thagard's criticism, as illustrated in his Galileo example, may be unwarranted since Simonton's BVSR model does not entail the equiprobability of the success of both Galileo's discovery and of his hypothetical nonsensical thought. Not only that, but the example also suggests blind variation to be the whole story, when in reality the BVSR model expressly includes a second element of selective retention (this is the “SR” in “BVSR”); and this selective element is something creativity also has in common with biological evolution: “The creative individual, too, produces original ideas, which are then subjected to first cognitive and then sociocultural selection, retaining solely those ideas that are adaptive by some criteria of utility, truth, or beauty” (Simonton, 1999 , p. 322; and also, e.g., Simonton, 2010 , p. 157). So, although this selective function is not part of the variational process itself (which is blind), it is still present at the (sub)personal and collective levels, which could explain why Galileo did not have something like the nonsensical idea Thagard described, or at least why we would not know about it if he did. Last, besides these points about blindness and the importance of selection, Thagard's focus on Simonton ( 2010 ) as a target of criticism is curious for the further reason that, in Simonton's account at least, blind variation is an explicitly combinatorial mechanism: rather than the single-concept mutation view, what Simonton proposes is precisely that creativity is “contingent on the capacity to proliferate blind combinatorial variations” (Simonton, 2010 , p. 158; refer to, e.g., Simonton, 2011 , 2013 ), which situates both Simonton's and Thagard's accounts within the same larger camp, even if they disagree with regard to the specific nature of combinatorial processes.

Setting aside the question of whether Thagard's ( 2012 ) criticism of Simonton's ( 2010 ) account is warranted, the second contrast useful for understanding Thagard's proposal is one between his convolution-based combinatorial approach and the alternative combinatorial approach based on neural synchronization. Both approaches, as Thagard explains, are candidate solutions to the binding problem. In the neural synchronization view, the coherence of experience is a result of the binding of neuronal firing patterns that represent different incoming sensory stimuli but that are temporally coordinated: “The neural synchrony hypothesis is that binding takes place because the representations that need to be bound together are firing in the same temporal patterns” (Thagard, 2019 , p. 26). Thagard criticizes neural synchronization models for being too biologically implausible, in some cases making assumptions that do not hold about real neurons and in other cases requiring “more neurons than exist in the human brain” (Thagard, 2012 , p. 115). He also identifies important cognitive limitations attending synchronization models (refer to Thagard, 2019 , pp. 26–27). On the one hand, for instance, while temporal coordination may contribute to how we recognize perceived objects through binding sensory inputs, Thagard suggests it is not clear how this can accommodate the fact that we often draw inferences about those perceived objects for which there is no incoming sensory stimulation. On the other hand, even if neural synchronization is responsible for the binding of representations that are temporally coordinated, Thagard argues that neural synchronization models do not thereby explain how we manipulate representations once they have been bound together. Limitations like these pose general challenges for neural synchronization as a solution to the binding problem, but they are even more relevant for the project of understanding the emergence of creative thoughts and ideas, since in the combinatorial perspective these are supposed to arise from manipulations that bind together different representations. These limitations motivate Thagard to pursue an alternative approach drawing instead on Eliasmith's ( 2013 ) work on convolution and semantic pointers.

Thagard offers two helpful analogies to explain the perspective he favors. The first analogy describes convolution by reference to braiding hair. If you weave together strands of hair to form a braid, later it is still possible to undo the braid to get the strands back apart; similarly, convolution is a mathematical function by which neuronal patterns are hypothesized to weave together representations in such a way that it is still possible to access the individual representations separately (which would not be the case if concepts always mutated like genes). The second analogy describes the semantic pointer architecture by analogy to street addresses. An address with street name and building number offers a short and convenient way to represent whatever occupies a specific location (e.g., your house); similarly, a pointer in a computational sense is a representation whose value is the value of some other representation or set of representations, such that it functions as an address that indicates (i.e., points to) that representation or set. These two notions work together because, in the view Thagard adopts, “Semantic pointers result from binding multiple representations together by means of convolution” (Thagard, 2019 , p. 29): that is, through convolution, neural patterns of activity with all kinds of different representational content can be “woven” (or bound) together, regardless of temporal coordination; and by doing so as part of an entire architecture of pointers, the woven or bound pattern can function as a specific pointer without thereby compromising access to the individual representations directly or their use as part of other pointers. It is for reasons like these that Thagard proposes that “creativity results from neural processes that include binding of representations, generation of new concepts and rules, and the application of analogies” (Thagard, 2019 , p. 247). As he explains, the binding applies to “the full range of multimodal representations needed for creativity in the domains of scientific discovery, technological invention, artistic imagination, and social innovation” (p. 248): this includes, for instance, verbal, mathematical, imagistic, or sensorimotor representations, all of which can be combined into new pointers that are creative because they are original, surprising, and valuable in the specified domain.

Thagard's account is relevant for us as a prime example of a cutting-edge approach to creativity in the cognitive science of science. Thagard ( 2012 , 2019 ) is explicitly concerned with the project of applying theories and methods from cognitive science to make sense of science, including scientific practices of problem solving, explanation, modeling, belief formation, conceptual change, and theory development, and it is in the context of this larger project that he offers an account of creativity as it occurs for individual cognitive agents engaged in scientific work. Moreover, Thagard's view is particularly significant for present purposes because of his outspoken criticism of non-representational approaches in embodied cognitive science. Thagard characterizes non-representationalism as “radical and implausible” (2019, p. 48). He grants the importance of the body and of situated activity for cognitive functioning, but he believes that these are explanatorily incomplete without reference to internal information processing. As he puts it, “Humans are indeed embodied dynamic systems embedded in their environments, but our success in those environments depends heavily on our ability to represent them mentally and to perform computations on those representations” (2012, p. 155). Ultimately, for Thagard as for other critics, embodiment is not a viable alternative to the computational-representational paradigm, but merely a dimension of cognitive phenomena that is to be accommodated into information-processing models. Crucially, this leads Thagard to complete skepticism about the use of non-representational embodied accounts for advancing our understanding of creativity in the cognitive science of science: as he affirms categorically, “no one has a clue how to use pure embodiment to explain creative developments in science and technology” (2012, p. 155) because, ultimately, he thinks that “explaining our cognitive capacities requires recognizing representational/computational abilities that outstrip embodied action” (p. 56).

3. The Functionalist Roots of Embodied Cognitive Science

The general aim of this article is to propose that, despite its non-representational character, embodied cognitive science (or “4E Cognition”) can make a positive contribution to the goals of the cognitive science of science, including the particular project of making sense of scientific creativity. As suggested at the beginning of the paper and exemplified by Thagard's criticism, this is a controversial proposal. It is controversial because of how the difference between computational-representational cognitive science and embodied cognitive science is often construed. As just seen, computational-representational cognitive science acknowledges the importance of bodily activity at the input and output levels and it investigates the informational states and manipulation processes that lead from sensory input to behavioral output; sometimes it also assigns a role to the body in the specific formatting of representational structures (refer to, e.g., Barsalou, 2008 ). In contrast, non-representational embodied cognitive science, as seen by critics, appears merely to deny the existence of internal informational states and computational procedures, and to thereby place all the explanatory burden on bodily activities at the input and output levels, in effect leaving a vacuum between the two. This oversimplification is clear, for instance, in the way critics sometimes disparagingly treat the non-representationalism of ecological psychology “as merely a form of dressed-up behaviorism,” as Shapiro ( 2010 , p. 38) puts it in explicit reference to Fodor and Pylyshyn ( 1981 ). Bunge and Ardila ( 2012 ) also endorse this crude comparison when they state that “Both hold that behavior is the sole effect of environmental stimuli; both model the organism as an empty box. The difference between them is that, whereas ecological psychology focuses on perception, behaviorism is mainly interested in overt behavior” (p. 120). Were this a fair characterization of ecological psychology in particular and of embodied cognitive science more generally, the critics' pessimism would be well justified—but this is not a fair characterization. To see why, it is helpful to take a larger view of contemporary embodied cognitive science and to understand it in continuity with the functionalist tradition in psychology developed over a century ago by William James and John Dewey 1 .

For the sake of clarity, it is worth noting how the sense of “functionalism” at play here is different from the one used in other contexts. In a different sense, common, especially in philosophy of mind (refer to, e.g., Polger, 2012 ; Levin, 2018 ), functional explanation describes psychological states in terms of what they “do” at a level of description that abstracts away from implementation details. For instance, understood functionally, the heart pumps blood, and this is a function that can be implemented using non-biological materials (e.g., an artificial heart). But more than simply being interested in identifying what the functions of a particular psychological state are, functionalism is the view that equates that state's identity with its function: in this view, “what it is to be a psychological state of a certain sort just is and consists entirely of having a certain function” (Polger, 2012 , p. 337). In mainstream computational-representational cognitive science, explanation at the algorithmic level (Marr, 1982 ) can be seen as functionalist in this philosophical sense insofar as it explains cognition in terms of mental functions that are medium-independent and, at least in principle, “multiply realizable” or implementable in different media (e.g., in the human brain, in artificial intelligent agents, in distributed computational/cognitive systems, etc.). This is not the “functionalism” this article is concerned with. The psychological approach of James and Dewey is “functionalist” in a different sense, rooted in a Darwinian, naturalist perspective that seeks to understand psychological phenomena in terms of their biological role in nature (refer to, e.g., Godfrey-Smith, 1996 ; Chemero, 2013 ). Along these lines, Heidbreder ( 1933 ) emphasizes how, for psychological functionalists like James and Dewey, to properly understand a given “mental operation,” it is necessary to “investigate both its antecedents and its consequences, to discover what difference it makes to the organism, and to take into account its whole complex setting in the complex world in which it appears” (p. 202). Psychological functionalism (our focus here) can thus be seen as moving in the opposite direction of philosophical functionalism, rejecting abstract characterizations of mental phenomena and emphasizing their inherently situated, context-dependent, and biological nature. In more contemporary terms, functionalism (in the relevant psychological sense) has turned into a focus on the embedded, enactive, and ecological nature of cognition as a feature of brain-body-environment systems.

Taking into consideration how radically different the functionalist paradigm is makes it possible to move beyond purely negative characterizations of embodied cognitive science (i.e., merely as the rejection of representations) and to arrive at a fuller appreciation of its potential given the resources at its disposal. Toward this goal, the current section offers a selective overview of key aspects of the functionalist framework lying at the foundation of contemporary embodied cognitive science. Besides situating the contemporary work in its proper historical context, this exercise also helps reveal the richness of embodied cognitive science and the resources it has at its disposal for making sense of complex cognitive phenomena including even those at play in scientific creativity. To be clear, however, creativity only becomes our primary focus in section 4: for now, our analysis is at the level of the assumptions at play in psychological theorizing, which includes but is not limited to theorizing about creativity. To have a good grasp of the functionalist paradigm developed by James and Dewey, before examining directly how they construed “mind” and “thought” (section 3.2), it is helpful first to consider how their ideas relate to, and diverge from, popular views stemming from classical empiricism.

3.1. Empiricism Without Elementarism and Associationism

In agreement with Locke, Hume, and other empiricists, functionalists in the Jamesian and Deweyan sense see experience as the bedrock of our mental lives and the only possible source of content for our thoughts: the crucial difference is that functionalists reject the assumption of elementarism and associationism. For classical empiricists, thought is built up from “ideas” or “impressions” given by the senses. Our sensory organs register how phenomena in the external world impinge upon them, providing the mind with distinct sensations of simple qualities of objects, such as size, shape, texture, color, tone, taste, smell, and so on. These simple sensory impressions furnish the mind with elements that, in turn, can get associated in various ways. In perception, these elements combine to provide the unitary, coherent experience we have of a tomato, for instance, rather than disconnected impressions of seeing red and of smelling and tasting a peculiar, fresh fragrance and flavor. Beyond perception, however, the association of elementary sensory ideas or impressions is also what explains our ability to think about what we have not seen: if, for instance, I had never seen a yellow or green tomato but you described one to me, I would be able to imagine it by rearranging sensory impressions I had of tomatoes along with non-tomato-related impressions of yellow or green. For classical empiricists, it was important to emphasize that even the most abstract thoughts we may have must originate in experience: in contrast with their rival rationalists (most prominently those of Cartesian influence), who believed that at least some, and perhaps most or all, mental content is innate, empiricists instead held that anything we can think of necessarily traces back to sensory impressions or their combinations, however complex the combination may be.

Like the classical empiricists, James, Dewey, and other functionalists reject nativism and see experience as being of central importance for thought, the only source of what we can think about. But unlike classical empiricists, functionalists reject the assumption of elementarism and associationism, and a straightforward reason for this is that this assumption gets the actual order of events exactly in reverse. As James emphasizes, we perceive objects in their entirety, and the ability to categorize and distinguish the parts and features of objects is added upon the basic experience rather than being its starting point. During childhood, we are taught by adults how to name different characteristics of objects, and through this practice, we develop skills in differentiating between characteristics of a given type as well as among types of characteristics. To use James's own example, in drinking a lemonade on a hot summer day, one can identify “the sourness, the coolness, the sweet, the lemon aroma, etc., and the several degrees of strength of each and all of these things” (James, 1890/1983 , p. 652), yet, even if the lemonade is prepared by combining ingredients with these distinctly identifiable characteristics, it is a mistake to conclude that the experience of lemonade flavor is a composite of these elementary sensations. A child drinking lemonade for the first few times experiences a single, simple flavor and only later learns to discriminate the various specific characteristics just described. This results in a qualitative change, “the experience [now] falling into a large number of aspects, each of which is abstracted, classed, named, etc.” (ibid.) and, as such you might judge this lemonade to be too sweet or too sour or too cold. Still, we have no reason to suppose, just because the lemonade was made by combining lemon with sugar and cold water in some ratio, that the experience of the lemonade itself is similarly composed of the addition of independently experienced elementary sensations 2 .

In Dewey, also, we find much the same way of thinking. Already in his classical article against the “reflex arc,” Dewey ( 1896 ) emphasizes how the notions of “stimulus” and “response” are analytical categories that the psychologist uses to describe phenomena rather than components of the phenomenon itself that are separable from each other and independent from observation. Something counts as a stimulus only retroactively, and only because the individual (the observer) had identified some later event to be a response to that earlier event: where no action is observed and labeled as a response, no earlier event is identified as a stimulus, even though there is always a multitude of things seen, heard, touched and so on. So it is not right to say that stimuli cause responses because, quite in the opposite direction, it is our calling something a response that causes us to call something else that preceded it a stimulus. And the same general principle applies to elementarism and associationism, namely, that we have to resist the impulse to reify our analytical categories. This is one version of what James calls the psychologist's fallacy, in which the psychologist as an external observer confuses “his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report” (1890/1983, p. 195). This fallacy manifests itself in a variety of ways, such as in assuming that whatever the psychologist has words to describe must exist, and whatever there are no words to describe must not exist; and assuming that the smallest and/or simplest parts the observer can identify in the phenomenon in fact correspond to its elementary building blocks. As Dewey explains, we must be careful not to assume that the elements we identify when we describe a phenomenon and discriminate its characteristics actually correspond to basic “sensory data” (i.e., simple qualities given to the senses) that combine to yield a unitary perception: “Sensory data, whether they are designated psychic or physical, are thus not starting points; they are the products of analysis” (Dewey, 1925/1929 , p. 144). Put differently, the version of the psychologist's fallacy at play here is that of assuming that, because the psychologist can name different parts and aspects of a given object to analytically decompose it, a subject's perception of that same object must be caused by the combining together of such parts and aspects as discrete sensory data. Strictly speaking, in terms of logical or metaphysical necessity, it does not follow from a person's ability to decompose an object into parts and features that the person's thought about the object is made up from, or decomposable into, (sub)thoughts about its parts and features.

For James and Dewey, then, elementarism and associationism reverse the natural order of events and mistake analytical categories (which are learned) for proper parts of things and of thought. But the more fundamental reason for rejecting elementarism and associationism is that they rest on a problematic assumption about the mind and its relation to the world. This is the assumption that there is a gap between subjects and the “external world” and that experience of the world is indirect, mediated by structures that make present internally (i.e., that re-present) to the mind aspects of what is (or has been) out there. As James neatly puts it, this common but problematic view presupposes that “the mind must in some fashion contain what it knows,” such that, for example, “for m and n to be known in any way whatever, little rounded and finished off duplicates of each must be contained in the mind as separate entities” (James, 1890/1983 , p. 472). Along similar lines, Dewey denounces the common “conception of experience as the equivalent of subjective private consciousness” (Dewey, 1925/1929 , p. 11), a conception he sees as motivating a strange conclusion: if appearances stand for and indirectly make present to the mind certain things and events in the so-called “external world,” then what we know and experience directly is only those appearances and not real things and events in the real world. In contrast, functionalists understand “experience” as an objective event that unfolds in the real world (which is neither “internal” nor “external”), an event in which, at a particular point in time and space, different processes and objects intersect and relate to one another in various ways. For the human individual, the relations of experience are not only mechanical or chemical, for instance, but also “cognitive,” a term that traditionally was not limited to the “psychological” or “mental” but also encompassed the “epistemic.” In other words, from the perspective of the human individual, experience establishes an objective relation of knowledge, or acquaintance with reality: rather than merely obtaining subjective sensory clues to a mysterious “external” world we are otherwise separated from, having an experience is a matter of participating in a rich web of objective relations through which we directly come to know, or become familiar with, things in the world.

This reconceptualization of experience, or of the mind's relation to the world, imparts a whole new layer of meaning to the functionalists' rejection of elementarism and associationism. When James and Dewey say that experience is not first and foremost of parts and features that are recombined internally but of whole things, their point is not simply that the appearances we supposedly form in “subjective private consciousness” (e.g., sensory inputs, or “ideas” and “impressions”) are holistic, as if representing entire objects before representing their parts. Rather, the point is that, through experience, we become acquainted with entire things (i.e., things themselves, not some supposedly “finished off duplicates” inside the mind), whatever the object of our concern and attention is. No doubt, in many situations, we are especially sensitive to different details and aspects of the objects we are interacting with. Consider, for instance, the difference between buying bananas because you want some fruit (any fruit) for the week to come and, in contrast, buying bananas that are ripe so that you can use them for baking soon, preferably today: in each case, different objects (e.g., bananas compared to apples or cucumbers) and different characteristics of those objects (e.g., their ripeness) will be relevant to you, and will shape your focus and activity. But rather than motivating the conclusion that parts and features are the building blocks of perception, these instances simply illustrate the fact that, in knowing things in their entirety, we can also come to know and care about their elementary parts and features when these matter for specific purposes. As James puts it,

The ‘simple impression' of Hume, the ‘simple idea' of Locke are both abstractions, never realized in experience. Experience, from the very first, presents us with concreted objects, vaguely continuous with the rest of the world which envelops them in space and time, and potentially divisible into inward elements and parts. (James, 1890/1983 , p. 461)

This reconceptualization thus makes it possible for functionalists to reject elementarism and associationism while still agreeing with empiricists with regard to the central importance of experience for our mental lives: while classical empiricists assume an agent who is separated from their environment and tasked with piecing together sensory impressions as clues to what may be “out there,” functionalists see experience as an objective relation to entire objects, a relation that can change with attention and intention, but which is of direct, unmediated acquaintance with reality.

3.2. Mind and Thought

This radically different functionalist conception of experience, or of our relation to the world, has as its counterpart a corresponding, and equally radically different, conceptualization of mind and thought. In a quote cited above, we saw how James is critical of the view that the mind needs to contain within itself a copy of what it knows—or, put differently, that knowing something amounts to recreating it inside the mind. The key point, now, is that this does not just misconstrue the nature of experience, as just seen, but it also mistakes the nature of mind, assuming it to be the sort of thing that can carry content, that can contain within itself objects of some sort or other.

James illustrates his alternative conception with the image of what he calls the stream of thought or stream of consciousness (James, 1890/1983 ). This well-known notion is sometimes interpreted narrowly, as simply emphasizing that thoughts lead to other thoughts in a continuing succession. Although this is not entirely inaccurate, the emphasis on mere succession overlooks the fact that, in favoring the image of the river or stream, James explicitly rejects the railway-inspired image of a “train” constituted by a number of separate, individual cars or wagons lined up one after the other (James, 1890/1983 , p. 233). A fuller appreciation of what James meant, then, must take into consideration that, when he first introduced the stream of thought or stream of consciousness, he also offered another name for it that he considered synonymous with the first two: the stream of subjective life (p. 233). Subjective life is, to be sure, characterized by a succession: over the course of a person's biography—the historical process that converges and intersects with other historical processes at particular experiences—the individual goes through a succession of activities, which includes a succession of objects interacted with and related to, both physically and conceptually. And as James recognizes, our thought changes over time, between each of these situations, and sometimes even within them. But he was skeptical of the conception of thoughts as discrete entities, each with a different content, and all simultaneously living inside the mind, just waiting to be activated, raised to the level of conscious awareness, or something like that. In line with this, it is worth noting that James usually speaks of a stream of thought (in the singular) rather than a stream of thoughts (in the plural). In the sense at play here, thought is perhaps better understood as the entire mental condition or state of an organism at a given point in time. From this it follows, on the one hand, that we can never have more than one thought at the same time : as James puts it, we cannot “have two feelings in our mind at once” (1890/1983, p. 160), there is always a single total state of subjective life at a given point in time. On the other hand, it also follows that we can never have the same thought more than once : “no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before” (p. 224), to which he adds, “there is no proof that the same bodily sensation is ever got by us twice. What is got twice is the same OBJECT” (p. 225).

These and other points are illustrated in the example mentioned earlier of a child drinking lemonade. James explains:

The mind of the child enjoying the simple lemonade flavor and that of the same child grown up and analyzing it are in two entirely different conditions. Subjectively considered, the two states of mind are two altogether distinct sorts of fact. The later mental state says ‘this is the same flavor (or fluid) which that earlier state perceived as simple,' but that does not make the two states themselves identical. It is nothing but a case of learning more and more about the same topics of discourse or things. (James, 1890/1983 , p. 652)

A stream changes over its course: it has its ebbs and flows, and it turns to the right and to the left, sometimes abruptly, other times smoothly. Similarly, the mind (or our thought) changes over time as we attend to, interact with, and come to know better, different objects in different circumstances. Understanding thought in analogy to a flowing stream thus suggests a contrast with the conception of individual thoughts as distinct buckets of water: we can get multiple bucketfuls of water out of the stream, conceivably until we emptied out the river bed, yet this doesn't entail that the flowing stream just is a collection of bucket-sized amounts of water bumping into each other; so it is with the mind, whose entire state and whose transition between entire states constitute thought, such that thought cannot be equated to combinations of any kind of discrete, individual sub-parts we may wish to identify. This suggests, further, that we cannot combine or associate thoughts , but can only have new thoughts that are informed by previous ones: “Our Thought is not composed of parts, however so composed its objects may be” (James, 1890/1983 , p. 344), and “We cannot mix feelings as such, though we may mix the objects we feel, and from their mixture get new feelings” (p. 160). This also relates to the point that the same thought does not occur more than once. You can pick up a bucket of water and walk around with it, then put it back down, and later pick it up again, as many times as you want. The same is possible in some contemporary conceptions of mental content, as illustrated in section 2: once a given content is internally stored, it can be retrieved multiple times, just as it can be used to generate new representations. But if thought is the total state of subjective mental life at a point in time, it makes sense to conclude that we can never go back to a previous state: even if we now interact with and think about the same object as before, this is now a different thought, a different stage in subjective life. The present state is made up of an enriched web of relations and can include, for instance, a different appreciation of the object's meaning, or simply the recognition that this is the same object from earlier (e.g., it is the same lemonade flavor). New thoughts, James says, are “ cognizant and appropriative of the old, whereas the old were always cognizant and appropriative of something else” (1890/1983, p. 335); and, he adds later on, “The knowledge of some other part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing” (p. 571). When we think now about the same object as before, the object is the same but the thought is new, partly because it includes in itself prior stages of thought, including our knowledge of the same object back then and including even our knowledge of other objects and events and relations: “Experience is remolding us every moment, and our mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our experience of the whole world up to that date” (p. 228).

Compared to James's idea of the stream of thought—as just seen, so susceptible to misunderstanding—Dewey's conceptualization of mind in linguistic terms is rather straightforward. The dominant conception throughout the history of Western thought has been to treat the mind as a noun, that is, a substance, thing, or object. But thinking is an activity, something that we do; moreover, whatever we do, we can do it more or less mindfully or thoughtfully. Accordingly, Dewey proposes that “mind” is better understood as a verb, an adverb, or an adjective rather than as a noun. Emphasizing the adverbial character of mind, Dewey claims: “ mind denotes every mode and variety of interest in, and concern for, things: practical, intellectual, and emotional” (Dewey, 1980 , p. 263). Later, also highlighting the active, verb-like nature of mind, he states: “Mind is primarily a verb. It denotes all the ways in which we deal consciously and expressly with the situations in which we find ourselves” (ibid.). As such, it is more adequate to see an individual “thought” as a slice of an activity we engage in rather than a distinct entity underlying that activity. Along these lines, Dewey claims: “the organism is not just a structure; it is a characteristic way of interactivity which is not simultaneous, all at once but serial. It is a way impossible without structures for its mechanism, but it differs from structure as walking differs from legs or breathing from lungs” (Dewey, 1925/1929 , p. 292). Besides criticizing the reification of the mental and mindful as a supposedly underlying thing (i.e., a mind), this quote also suggests Dewey would agree with James that we cannot have more than one thought at once nor have the same thought more than once. On the one hand, even if we try to multitask, there is always a single thing we are doing, however fast we may be trying to jump between activities and objects of concern. On the other hand, when we repeat an action we have performed before, what that means is typically that we are performing a similar action to accomplish similar ends, just as, by “the same thought” we normally just mean we're once again thinking about the same object. Strictly speaking, however, we cannot have the same thought more than once because we cannot perform the very same action more than once nor move our bodies in exactly the same way as before.

In a passage worth quoting at length, Dewey describes some of the effects of misconceiving mind as a noun, a thing:

Unfortunately, an influential manner of thinking has changed modes of action into an underlying substance that performs the activities in question. It has treated the mind as an independent entity that attends, purposes, cares, notices, and remembers. This change of ways of responding to the environment into an entity from which actions proceed is unfortunate, because it removes the mind from necessary connection with the objects and events, past, present, and future, of the environment with which responsive activities are inherently connected. Mind that bears only an accidental relation to the environment occupies a similar relation to the body. In making the mind purely immaterial (isolated from the organ of doing and undergoing), the body ceases to be living and becomes a dead lump. (Dewey, 1934/1980 , pp. 263–264)

Mind and thought are, in the functionalist view, activities we engage in or our manner of dealing with the world—which includes, as seen above, the cognitive or epistemic character of experience for human organisms. It is easy to see how significant this perspective is when it comes to a number of philosophical disputes, including those surrounding the mind-body problem, the problem of other minds, and skeptical concerns about the existence of the external world: in fact, Dewey predicts that “if there were an interdict placed for a generation upon the use of mind, matter, consciousness as nouns” rather than as adjectives and adverbs, we would as a result “find many of our problems much simplified” (Dewey, 1925/1929 , pp. 75).

4. Discussion: Rethinking Scientific Creativity from a Functionalist, Embodied Perspective

The previous section explored some foundational themes in the functionalist tradition in psychology developed by James and Dewey, emphasizing their views on the nature of mind, thought, experience, and the relation between mind and world. While certainly relevant for an appreciation of the history of the sciences of the mind, this exercise is of more than merely historical interest. The contemporary view of cognition as embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and ecological may seem to be a recent invention, but its roots extend far back to James's and Dewey's functionalist psychology (on these historical connections refer to, e.g., Heft, 2001 ; Johnson and Rohrer, 2007 ; Chemero, 2009 ; Gallagher, 2009 ; Lobo et al., 2018 ; Crippen and Schulkin, 2020 ; Heras-Escribano, 2021 ). As such, gaining a better understanding of the functionalist paradigm can be a powerful means to properly understand embodied cognitive science, its goals, and potential. The prospect of developing an embodied cognitive account of scientific creativity seems particularly daunting if—like some critics mentioned in sections 2 and 3—you take embodied cognitive science to hold the same view of mind and thought as mainstream cognitive science except for the rejection of computation and representation . But this is a misconception. The functionalist roots of embodied cognitive science reveal a radically different paradigm compared to the one at play in the computational-representational cognitive framework. Considering these differences can provide valuable insight into the field and suggest innovative directions for contemporary discussions about creativity and science. In what follows I sketch this, first, by identifying some direct implications of functionalist ideas for thinking about creativity, and then by linking these to more current views and projects in embodied cognitive science.

Section 2 presented prominent ways of approaching creativity from the computational-representational perspective, in terms of the heuristics a problem-solver creates and uses (Newell, Shaw, and Simon) or, more generally, in terms of how we process and “bind” mental representations of various sorts in the context of everyday activities including but not limited to problem solving (Thagard). Despite the difference in focus and scope, the starting point in both accounts is the view that creative “outputs” arise from manipulations of internal knowledge structures. Of course, this appeal to internal knowledge structures already reveals a point of fundamental disagreement for the classical functionalists and those of us following in that tradition. But it is important not to oversimplify the disagreement. It could perhaps seem like researchers in embodied cognitive science merely and stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the existence of mental representations and internal knowledge structures, as if embodied anti-representationalism was a mere recapitulation of the most extreme forms of behaviorism, as already suggested. More accurately, however, the important point is that the intellectual pull to posit internal knowledge structures arises out of a view of the relation between mind and world that, from the functionalist perspective, is inadequate: namely, the assumption that a gap separates agents from their environment such that we can have no direct acquaintance with reality and can only obtain knowledge about the world by reconstructing it internally—as Di Paolo, Buhrmann and Barandiaran put it, this is the problematic assumption that “one cannot have knowledge of what is outside oneself except through the ideas one has inside oneself” (Di Paolo et al., 2017 , p. 23). We saw in section 3 that both James and Dewey reject this view of mind along with the associated view of experience as private subjective consciousness. In line with this, the rejection of elementarism and associationism motivates seeing the binding problem as more of a pseudo-problem. We do not need to explain how representations combine to yield coherent internal “experiences” of the external world: experience (as an objective event that is neither “internal” nor “external”) is itself coherent and connects entire things, such as objects and persons in situations. Knowers can participate in experience more or less fully and more or less attentively, but in any case, the qualitative character of the experience for those participating in it does not arise from combining “ideas” or “impressions” of individual objects or their elementary parts and features, but rather through direct acquaintance with selected aspects of the unfolding situation 3 .

This alternative way of understanding mind and experience has significant implications for how we approach creativity from a psychological standpoint. In an ordinary sense, we say we “have an idea” when we have an insight, when a thought occurs to us that reveals something new, such as a novel plan or course of action. From a Jamesian/Deweyan functionalist perspective, it would be a mistake to think that this amounts to having a new “idea” in the elementarist-associationist sense synonymous with “impressions,” as if a new internal representational structure was created from the combination of previous thoughts (other “ideas” or “impressions”) about the object in question. Thoughts are not countable entities that you can collect and mix and match, but rather are activities we engage in, each constituting a momentary state of subjective life. Similar events may reoccur in life, but one and the same event never literally repeats itself. The same is true of thought. Thinking is something agents do in some situation or other, and that is why, as we have seen, it is impossible to have the exact same thought more than once, just as it is impossible to do exactly the same thing more than once; moreover, we cannot combine or associate thoughts because we do not even have more than one thought at once, no matter how rapidly we try to shift from one thought (i.e., one thinking activity) to another. Every time we think about some object or topic, then, we are having a new thought because we are engaging in a new act of thinking , and this is so even if it is the same object or topic as before, and even if we are thinking about it in what seems to be the same way we had previously done. Understood from this functionalist perspective, then, “having an idea” in the ordinary sense amounts to an instance where this thought (which is new , as all thoughts always are) involves a significantly changed relation to old objects or topics: through this new thought we now relate to those objects in a different, novel way that is appealing and strikes us as promising.

This motivates reevaluating what we usually call “creativity.” In a way, every thought is creative , because every instance of thinking is a new active adaptation to a new situation and experience. On the other hand, we can still speak of activity that is “creative” in the sense of being distinctly or differently innovative—just what the distinction or difference is, however, must be considered more carefully.

In popular media and in academic circles alike, discussions about creativity, and especially about creativity in science, tend to revolve around examples of extraordinary, even revolutionary innovators like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and a few others. Although understandable and justified in some contexts, this focus on seemingly unique individuals can be misleading. Figures like the ones just mentioned have over time gained a special cultural status because of their influential and innovative ideas. But this personal status sometimes seems to motivate the conclusion that their ideas were special because they were theirs, that the ideas were creative because they were had by creative people, rather than the other way around. The mythical standing of creative geniuses is entangled with the psychologization of “creativity” as an individual mental attribute, whether as a special mental faculty that acts as the source of creative ideas or as a cognitive process that yields creative outputs: either way, as something that people own and possess, creativity also becomes something that people possess differentially , that some have more of, others less, and others conceivably lack entirely.

As already seen, researchers studying creativity often point out that what makes some idea or product creative is the fact that it is novel, surprising, and useful, or somehow valuable (e.g., Boden, 2004 ; Simonton, 2012 ). This reasonable perspective should raise a red flag for internalist views that hope to find “a single cognitive or neural mechanism” responsible for “the extraordinary creative capacities of an Einstein or a Shakespeare” as Dietrich and Haider ( 2017 , p. 1) put it. These popular criteria suggest that there is nothing intrinsic to a given idea or product that makes it inherently creative: rather, an idea's or product's “creativeness” is a relational characteristic, one that depends in part on how the idea or product in question relates to other ideas or products (e.g., which other ideas or products exist and what they are like) and in part, it depends on how the idea or product in question relates to other people (for whom the new idea or product is more or less useful in some way, for some purpose). From this, it follows that we cannot reasonably expect there to be internal mechanisms that fully explain the origin of creative ideas or products. If the sociomaterial context (at least partly, if not entirely) determines which ideas or products count as creative in that context and which do not, then that means that one and the same idea or product could, in different circumstances, count as creative and as not creative. Accordingly, even if there were “cognitive or neural mechanisms” that properly and uniquely explain the origin of certain ideas or products we consider creative in a given context , the same mechanisms might not be explanatory of creativity in other contexts because the ideas or products they supposedly originate would themselves not count as creative in those other contexts. Given the sociomaterially-extended nature of what makes ideas and products count as creative, we reify “creativity” when we see it (only) as an individual mental endowment, a context-independent ability or capacity, and something that the geniuses—the Einsteins, Newtons, and Darwins—possess to an unusual degree, more than the rest of us.

If, in a sense, all thoughts and behaviors are creative, and if what makes some thoughts and behaviors distinctly creative is, at least in part, the sociomaterial context, then the challenge we are faced with is that of making sense of the specifically psychological or cognitive conditions for these distinctly creative thoughts and behaviors, and to do so without falling prey to tendencies toward internalist reification and individualistic exceptionalism. My proposal is that a promising direction for tackling this question from the perspective of embodied cognitive science lies precisely in expanding upon the radical functionalist conceptions of mind, thought, and experience.

In discussing the functionalist understanding of experience, or of mind's relation to the world, I suggested that attention and intention play a role in the way an individual engages in experience. The point is that an individual may be more or less attuned to experience, more or less sensitive to the relations and unfolding events, and may participate more or less fully in the situation. To elaborate on this point, let us consider a concrete situation such as a lab meeting in which colleagues meet to discuss updates in their scientific research. An extreme case of a shift in your participation in that shared experience would be if you fell asleep for a brief moment: even as your nodding off is part of the objectively unfolding situation and others might even notice it, this is an instance in which the experience temporarily has no subjective qualitative character for you (it lacks a “how” for you, as Dewey puts it). But even while fully awake our attention can shift in different directions, which is another way to frame our participation in experiences. If you get distracted, you might briefly tune out of the discussion and notice the threatening clouds out the window, and from them turn to the parking lot, and then to the plans you had of stopping by the grocery store on the drive home after the meeting, until you realize you are thinking about recipes rather than contributing to the discussion. Alternatively, you may be fully invested in the conversation and your shifts in attention are constructive and contribute to the goal of the discussion: so instead of noticing the clouds and the parking lot out the window, you notice something in the graph projected on the screen, or in your colleague's description of their new experimental design, and by mentioning these you help open up new directions for the discussion. Of course, it could even be a combination of these two scenarios, such as, for instance, if your momentarily turning away to the clouds and the parking lot out the window actually leads you to notice something different that is relevant for the ongoing discussion: maybe a technical difficulty can be avoided by uploading the experimental data “to the cloud” or perhaps the bright green car in the parking lot suggests a different experimental manipulation to try or the car's sudden breaking inspires you to think of a potentially useful tweak in the damping parameter in the mathematical model under discussion. This example intimates two important aspects of the distinctly “creative.”

The first has to do with the relation between insight and sight, or between creativity and perception more generally. In different ways of participating in a shared experience such as the ones just described, “having an idea” that is valuable for others can be the result of an individual attending to different aspects of the situation and, sometimes quite literally, seeing different things and/or seeing the same things differently. James seems to suggest as much when he says, “some people are far more sensitive to resemblances, and far more ready to point out wherein they consist, than others are. They are the wits, the poets, the inventors, the scientific men, the practical geniuses” (James, 1890/1983 , p. 500). More recently, building upon functionalist foundations, ecological psychologists speak of perception as “an achievement of the individual, not an appearance in the theater of his consciousness” and as “a keeping-in-touch with the world, an experiencing of things rather than a having of experiences” (Gibson, 1979 , p. 239). In this ecological perspective, perceiving is most prominently an act of detecting affordances , that is, detecting possibilities for action that the environment offers the agent given the agent's skills and sensorimotor makeup in relation to the characteristics of the object or surface in question (Gibson, 1979 ; Reed, 1996 ; Heft, 2001 ; Chemero, 2009 ; Turvey, 2018 ). Sometimes individuals just casually happen upon some aspect of the situation that others had not noticed, perceiving affordance others had so far overlooked. But individuals can also over time become differentially sensitive to some aspects of the situation more than others (that is, more than they are sensitive to other aspects and also more sensitive than other people are to the same aspects): as an activity, perceiving can become more skillful through attunement or the “education of attention” (Gibson, 1966 ; Jacobs and Michaels, 2007 ; Araújo and Davids, 2011 ). This can be seen as a specific instance of what James and Dewey both referred to as “habits,” that is, specialized, context-sensitive patterns of activity—in this case, the activity of perceiving or exploring the environment (refer to James, 1890/1983 , 1899 ; Dewey, 1922 ; Segundo-Ortin and Heras-Escribano, 2021 ; for related embodied accounts emphasizing the ecology of skillful performance refer to, e.g., Christensen et al., 2016 ; Christensen and Sutton, 2019 ; Sutton and Bicknell, 2020 ). Importantly, however, what is at play here is direct contact with reality and the detection (rather than inference or estimation) of relations between things in the world: “The mind does not need to associate sequential regularities; such regularities only need to be detected. Associations are perceived rather than perceptions associated” (Lombardo, 1987 , p. 291). Having an insight, then, can be a matter of noticing that some object (physical or conceptual) affords a given manipulation that turns out to be useful in a novel and surprising way.

To emphasize the education of attention, as above, is to emphasize the dynamically changing nature of the perception, or how our engagement with the world and participation in experience can become more skillful over time. This connects to the second point, which has to do with the dynamically changing nature of the creative activity itself. In a recent article focusing on jewelry making, Baber et al. ( 2019 ) criticize the notion that a designer begins with a complete idea and then works on some material to impose that form onto it; rather, they propose, the designer works with materials to discover what the final product can and will be. The authors criticize the common “separation of ‘creation-in-the-head' [from] a physical behavior that is merely the acting out of this ‘cognition'” (p. 285), a view that they see as inadequate because, as they observe, “technology mediates human activity through a process of mutual co-construction” (p. 284). At the beginning of the process, the material presents the jeweler with a range of possibilities but it also imposes specific limitations depending on its particular features, including its unique shape, composition, deformities, etc. As the jeweler engages with that material, each new intervention reveals and creates new possibilities and limitations. Drawing from dynamical systems theory the authors propose, “‘creativity' arises from the dynamic interplay between jewelers and their technology” (p. 284).

What is worth highlighting here is that creative activity (including creative thinking) is not simply a matter of perceiving unusual affordances in the here and now, nor of merely having over time developed skillful perceptual attunement such that we can perceive affordances others cannot: rather, or in addition, the activity itself has this dynamic, co-constructive character, in which each new engagement further constrains and enables future activity, such that the outcome cannot be fully articulated in advance, before this iterative, interactive process started. In the case of creativity in science, this includes, of course, literal physical manipulations through which we operate in an innovative way on an object (e.g., a measuring instrument, or the thing measured) or combine objects in an unusual way. But it can also include the manipulation of symbolic structures, such as variables in a mathematical formula or concepts in a linguistically-articulated theoretical description, in writing, in conversation, or in soliloquy. In this perspective, what is distinct about the psychological dimension of creative breakthroughs in science is the especially attuned or “educated” attention some individuals develop which allows them not only to see what others cannot or do not, but also to engage with materials, objects, and structures (including symbolic ones) in ways that dynamically co-create further possibilities for action (i.e., affordances).

These references to the conceptual and symbolic might strike some readers as a case of smuggling in representational thinking through the back door. On the contrary, however, I see the present paper as contributing to the larger project many of us in embodied cognitive science are already engaged in of not simply responding to the ‘scaling up challenge' but in fact questioning the representation-hunger often ascribed to some cognitive phenomena (refer to, e.g., Zahnoun, 2021 ). Along these lines, it is useful to point out how the perspective on creativity being sketched here resonates with recent work approaching concepts and conceptual thought in ways that challenge more traditional internalist, representational accounts. also, e.g., Aerts et al., 2013 ). From a very different theoretical starting point, with a more explicitly cognitive neuroscientific focus, but moving in a similar direction, Casasanto and Lupyan ( 2015 ) provocatively propose that “all concepts are ad hoc ,” by which they mean that concepts are situation-specific, on-the-fly behavioral adaptations that “differ from one instantiation to the next, within and between individuals and groups” and that “are shaped by the contexts in which they are instantiated on every time scale, from the millisecond to the lifetime” (p. 561). In their view, we should move away from theorizing about “concepts, categories, and word meanings as things that we have in our minds” and instead “build theories of conceptualizing, categorizing, and constructing word meanings: things that we do with our minds” (Casasanto and Lupyan, 2015 , p. 543, emphasis original).

Other recent contributions emphasize the inherently social nature of conceptual thought as grounded in language, itself understood as an embodied social practice in the first place. Along these lines, Contreras Kallens et al. ( 2018 ) describe categorization as a social, interpersonal phenomenon that is flexible and can change over time, being even subject to cultural evolution and, therefore, amenable to modeling at the population level using similar methods already applied to other phenomena in cultural evolution. Through more anthropological and archaeological lens, John Sutton and colleagues have offered a compelling picture that emphasizes the inextricably material and social dimensions of skillful, creative, and conceptual activities, including the distributed cognitive activities at play in remembering (e.g., Sutton, 2008 , 2015 , 2020 ; also Sutton et al., 2010 ; Sutton and Keene, 2016 ). And from an individual developmental standpoint, Heft ( 2020 ) highlights how the sociocultural specificity of developmental trajectories makes it so that individual perception-action is never socioculturally ‘neutral', but is by necessity fundamentally shaped by shared practices: naturally, this includes linguistic practices, such that naming and talking about complex abstract processes or systems (e.g., the postal system) not only enables conceptual thinking, but makes it possible for conceptual thinking to guide adaptive perception-action in the here and now.

What these admittedly diverse lines of research reveal is that reference to the conceptual and symbolic, as in the present paper, need not amount to capitulation to internalist, representationalist theorizing. The view of creativity being sketched here focuses specifically on perception-action to propose that we understand creative innovation in terms of the enhanced perception of affordances (i.e., the educated attention) and the co-construction of possibilities through active engagement, that is, in terms of what Heft ( 2020 ) calls “habits of attention and skilled action” (p. 823). Still, this focus on perception-action is perfectly compatible with the recognition that behavior, as shaped by development within specific sociocultural practices, involves abilities to perceive-act that are sensitive to conceptual and symbolic meaning. In fact, this is something that becomes even clearer when we take into account the functionalist foundations of contemporary theorizing in embodied cognitive science, and in particular, the way functionalists made sense of intelligent behavior and the emergence of novelty, including the especially creative, in complex human practices such as those we find in science.

As Dewey puts it, “Command of scientific methods and systematized subject-matter liberates Individuals; it enables them to see new problems, devise new procedures, and, in general, makes for diversification rather than for set uniformity” (Dewey, 1929 , p. 12). Just as our current thought is shaped by prior thoughts, experience informs further engagement with the world by guiding what and how we see; this, in turn, as Dewey emphasizes here, further shapes understanding, or our ability to engage meaningfully with the world. So, Dewey adds, “Because the range of understanding is deepened and widened [the scientist] can take into account remote consequences which were originally hidden from view and hence were ignored in his action”; as a consequence, “Seeing more relations he sees more possibilities, more opportunities. He is emancipated from the need of following tradition and special precedents. His ability to judge being enriched, he has a wider range of alternatives to select from in dealing with individual situations” (Dewey, 1929 , p. 20-21). The specificity of experience shapes personal development, making some individuals sensitive to different aspects of the situation, and enabling them to detect and articulate unusual relations to and between objects, facts, and events; this also enables individuals to, by working with objects, give rise to new possibilities that they can then perceive and act on. In this way, creative developments in science can arise from an individual's differential sensitivity to existing possibilities and, through active engagement in the world, the co-creation of novel possibilities—all of which embody (or in- habit ) sociocultural practices, including practices of naming things and using language to constrain (limit and enable) perception-action in particular ways.

Building upon the functionalist foundations of embodied cognitive science, then, motivates approaching creativity as an activity rather than an underlying capacity, and understanding it psychologically but non-representationally in terms of affordance perception, the education of attention, and co-constructive embodied engagement in experience. No doubt, an approach like this constitutes a departure from traditional cognitive views that favor explanation in terms of internal, individual computational mental mechanisms. But, in this picture, creativity is still “cognitive” in the deeper sense that goes beyond the “psychological” and includes the “epistemic”: creativity is a matter of knowing reality, being acquainted with aspects of the world, and (re)cognizing possibilities, including even dynamically changing ones. In this sense, creativity is clearly dependent on previous knowledge, yet this does not entail anything representational: to know something is not to construct an internal copy of it, but rather to undergo transformation through experience, to have our modes of activity (including thinking) changed by transaction with things in the world. The role of the imagination in some creative activities (e.g., involving abstract reasoning) need not be seen as problematic. As Dewey ( 1934/1980 ) suggests, the ideas we come up with through imagination “are not made out of imaginary stuff. They are made out of the hard stuff of the world of physical and social experience” (p. 49). He adds: “The locomotive did not exist before Stevenson, nor the telegraph before the time of Morse. But the conditions for their existence were there in physical material and energies and in human capacity. Imagination seized hold upon the idea of a rearrangement of existing things that would evolve new objects” (p. 49). In this embodied framing, then, creative activity is cognitive in that it is a matter of expanding our knowledge and appreciation of what is possible and what could be made possible through interventions and interaction. The special and distinctly creative insight, then, is not a mental impression triggered in subjective consciousness but a specialization of thinking activity that is enriched because of what it knows. And this, again, is the the result of learning, that is, changing with experience, or the formation of habits:

The reason a baby can know little and an experienced adult know much when confronting the same things is not because the latter has a “mind” which the former has not, but because one has already formed habits which the other has still to acquire. The scientific man and the philosopher like the carpenter, the physician, and politician know with their habits not with their “consciousness.” The latter is eventual, not a source. Its occurrence marks a peculiarly delicate connection between highly organized habits and unorganized impulses. (Dewey, 1922 , p. 182–183)

Through experience, over time, we develop specialized ways of doing things and relating to the world (including both material and conceptual objects) that are sensitive to the context and task we are engaged in. Learning scientific methods and facts, then, like other specializations, is a matter of developing specific ways of dealing adaptively with particular situations. In this context, creative insight is a cognitive accomplishment in that it concerns epistemic contact with reality and the discovery of what the world presents to us.

To conclude, we are now in a different position to reconsider the view of creativity as the ability to combine or associate old, familiar ideas to generate new ones. If interpreted in traditional computational-representational terms, the combinatorial view commits a version of the psychologist's fallacy. No doubt, creative products—a novel mathematical model or a novel theoretical formulation that a scientist may come up with—are created by combining other previously existing physical and conceptual materials. But it is a fallacy to conclude from this that the idea of the product must have originated through the combination of the ideas of those other products and their parts or aspects. In creative activity, we do combine old, familiar things in new ways, but that is not detached from embodied engagement with the world around us: “The new vision does not arise out of nothing, but emerges through seeing, in terms of possibilities, that is, of imagination, old things in new relations serving a new end which the new end aids in creating” (Dewey, 1934/1980 , p. 49). In science as in other specialized domains, creative breakthroughs emerge from skilled, habituated sensorimotor activity in which we detect and forge, with old and familiar physical or conceptual objects, possibilities for further adaptation in a dynamically changing experience. One example is precisely what we are doing right now: revisiting old theories and methods—here, ideas about mind, thought, and experience from the functionalist tradition—as a way to inform and re-orient how we act now, including how we think about and address the scientific challenges we are faced with. If science involves standing on the shoulders of giants, then creative activity can be seen as a matter of sensitivity to the situation and perceiving whose shoulder to climb and which direction to look so as to go from the old to the new, casting fresh light on current problems and, through that, setting up new paths for advancing in understanding.

5. Conclusion

In the context of current debates about the limits of embodied cognitive science, this article offered an entry point to considering the embodied approach's promise for contributing to research in the cognitive science of scientific creativity. A common view of creativity describes it in combinatorial terms as involving associating what is old and familiar in order to generate something novel. One example of a combinatorial account of creativity in the cognitive science of science was examined, highlighting the role it assigns to the processing of internal knowledge structures for generating creative outputs. Proponents of the computational-representational paradigm criticize embodied cognitive science for being unreasonable and implausible in its anti-representationalism—hence the challenge to ‘scale up' embodied explanations to account for ‘representation-hungry' phenomena. Accordingly, the article was concerned with providing a richer picture of embodied cognitive science, moving beyond merely negative characterizations (i.e., simply as a rejection of representations). The article did this by exploring contemporary embodied cognitive science's theoretical and conceptual roots in the functionalist tradition in psychology developed by William James and John Dewey. As a continuation of this functionalist tradition, contemporary embodied cognitive science inherits a rich and sophisticated way of thinking about mind, thought, and experience, or the relation between mind and the world, one that is radically different from the computational-representational paradigm, but that amounts to more than a mere rejection of representations. For these classical functionalists, “mind” is something we do, or rather the character of some of our activities (e.g., when we act thoughtfully or mindfully). Not only that, but “thought” is similarly reframed as a total (if momentary) state of subjective life, or a slice of a dynamically unfolding activity (namely, thinking). A consequence of this view is that we cannot have more than one thought at once, nor have the same thought more than once, nor combine thoughts—which casts doubt on the combinatorial view of creativity interpreted in internalist, computational-representational terms. After identifying these key foundational aspects of the functionalist inheritance of embodied cognitive science, the article offered a sketch of how these concepts translate into a contemporary understanding of creative innovation in science. Focusing primarily on perception-action, the sketch offered here described creative innovation in terms of enhanced affordance perception (through the education of attention) and the dynamical co-construction of possibilities through active engagement with material and conceptual resources. The relation between this sketch and recent work on concepts and conceptual thinking, on the one hand, and between the two and old functionalist ideas, on the other, was explored in order to reveal how even a perception-action-focused view of creative innovation such as this can accommodate engagement with conceptual and symbolic resources in creative thinking and problem solving. The result is a view that, while not computational or representational, is still “cognitive” in that it sees creativity as a matter of knowing reality, being acquainted with aspects of the world, and (re)cognizing possibilities. Although it is in tension with internalist interpretations of the combinatorial view, the sketch offered here in itself illustrates how we combine old ideas (in this case, from the classical functionalists) in different contexts to respond to novel challenges and find creative solutions to new problems. Creativity involves combination and goes from old to new, but it is just not something that is done in our heads: rather, creativity is a feature of the mind's relation to the world, which is what the functionalists called “experience” and what we today describe in terms of brain-body-environment systems.

Data Availability Statement

Author contributions.

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

I acknowledge support by the German Research Foundation and the Open Access Publication Fund of TU Berlin.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's Note

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1 On the specific question of the relation between ecological psychology and behaviorism, including their similarities and differences, more nuanced discussions can be found in, e.g., Reed ( 1996 ), Heft ( 2001 ), and Barrett ( 2016 ).

2 This is an issue I will address directly later (section 4), but for now the reader is invited to consider how this example from James and the point articulated here relate to the binding problem discussed in section 2.

3 It's worth noting that, despite the radical theoretical and conceptual differences between the paradigms, the functionalist embodied framework is not inimical to the applied, practical orientation that traditional cognitive science has had since its early days, of pursuing explanations of cognitive phenomena by building mechanisms that implement certain principles (as seen in Newell, Shaw and Simon's work). In this direction, one reviewer asks how we could build something that has ‘direct acquaintance with selected aspects of the unfolding situation'. The simplest and most concrete answer is to point in the direction of applied work that already does that, such as work in evolutionary or biologically-inspired robotics (e.g., Brooks, 1990 , 1991 ; Webb, 1995 ; Reeve et al., 2005 ) and in artificial life (e.g., Beer, 1997 , 2004 , 2020 ; Froese et al., 2014 ; Campos and Froese, 2019 ). In more traditional approaches, it is common to model cognitive agency in terms of an input-output system with internal procedures that are responsible for actively controlling movement or activity (e.g., selecting, initiating, evaluating and correcting the execution of motor programs) and for interpreting incoming signals to build and update internal models of the environment and the likely sources of stimulation. In contrast, a common theme in projects in evolutionary robotics and artificial life such as the ones just cited is the emphasis on modeling cognitive agency in terms of intrinsic activity and selective sensitivity to the environment, where activity and sensitivity constrain and guide each other, both limiting and enabling a range of specific ways of direct participation in, and adaptation to, the unfolding situation.

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Problem-Solving Strategies and Obstacles

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• Application
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From deciding what to eat for dinner to considering whether it's the right time to buy a house, problem-solving is a large part of our daily lives. Learn some of the problem-solving strategies that exist and how to use them in real life, along with ways to overcome obstacles that are making it harder to resolve the issues you face.

What Is Problem-Solving?

In cognitive psychology , the term 'problem-solving' refers to the mental process that people go through to discover, analyze, and solve problems.

A problem exists when there is a goal that we want to achieve but the process by which we will achieve it is not obvious to us. Put another way, there is something that we want to occur in our life, yet we are not immediately certain how to make it happen.

Maybe you want a better relationship with your spouse or another family member but you're not sure how to improve it. Or you want to start a business but are unsure what steps to take. Problem-solving helps you figure out how to achieve these desires.

The problem-solving process involves:

• Discovery of the problem
• Deciding to tackle the issue
• Seeking to understand the problem more fully
• Researching available options or solutions
• Taking action to resolve the issue

Before problem-solving can occur, it is important to first understand the exact nature of the problem itself. If your understanding of the issue is faulty, your attempts to resolve it will also be incorrect or flawed.

Problem-Solving Mental Processes

Several mental processes are at work during problem-solving. Among them are:

• Perceptually recognizing the problem
• Representing the problem in memory
• Considering relevant information that applies to the problem
• Identifying different aspects of the problem
• Labeling and describing the problem

Problem-Solving Strategies

There are many ways to go about solving a problem. Some of these strategies might be used on their own, or you may decide to employ multiple approaches when working to figure out and fix a problem.

An algorithm is a step-by-step procedure that, by following certain "rules" produces a solution. Algorithms are commonly used in mathematics to solve division or multiplication problems. But they can be used in other fields as well.

In psychology, algorithms can be used to help identify individuals with a greater risk of mental health issues. For instance, research suggests that certain algorithms might help us recognize children with an elevated risk of suicide or self-harm.

One benefit of algorithms is that they guarantee an accurate answer. However, they aren't always the best approach to problem-solving, in part because detecting patterns can be incredibly time-consuming.

There are also concerns when machine learning is involved—also known as artificial intelligence (AI)—such as whether they can accurately predict human behaviors.

Heuristics are shortcut strategies that people can use to solve a problem at hand. These "rule of thumb" approaches allow you to simplify complex problems, reducing the total number of possible solutions to a more manageable set.

If you find yourself sitting in a traffic jam, for example, you may quickly consider other routes, taking one to get moving once again. When shopping for a new car, you might think back to a prior experience when negotiating got you a lower price, then employ the same tactics.

While heuristics may be helpful when facing smaller issues, major decisions shouldn't necessarily be made using a shortcut approach. Heuristics also don't guarantee an effective solution, such as when trying to drive around a traffic jam only to find yourself on an equally crowded route.

Trial and Error

A trial-and-error approach to problem-solving involves trying a number of potential solutions to a particular issue, then ruling out those that do not work. If you're not sure whether to buy a shirt in blue or green, for instance, you may try on each before deciding which one to purchase.

This can be a good strategy to use if you have a limited number of solutions available. But if there are many different choices available, narrowing down the possible options using another problem-solving technique can be helpful before attempting trial and error.

In some cases, the solution to a problem can appear as a sudden insight. You are facing an issue in a relationship or your career when, out of nowhere, the solution appears in your mind and you know exactly what to do.

Insight can occur when the problem in front of you is similar to an issue that you've dealt with in the past. Although, you may not recognize what is occurring since the underlying mental processes that lead to insight often happen outside of conscious awareness .

Research indicates that insight is most likely to occur during times when you are alone—such as when going on a walk by yourself, when you're in the shower, or when lying in bed after waking up.

How to Apply Problem-Solving Strategies in Real Life

If you're facing a problem, you can implement one or more of these strategies to find a potential solution. Here's how to use them in real life:

• Create a flow chart . If you have time, you can take advantage of the algorithm approach to problem-solving by sitting down and making a flow chart of each potential solution, its consequences, and what happens next.
• Recall your past experiences . When a problem needs to be solved fairly quickly, heuristics may be a better approach. Think back to when you faced a similar issue, then use your knowledge and experience to choose the best option possible.
• Start trying potential solutions . If your options are limited, start trying them one by one to see which solution is best for achieving your desired goal. If a particular solution doesn't work, move on to the next.
• Take some time alone . Since insight is often achieved when you're alone, carve out time to be by yourself for a while. The answer to your problem may come to you, seemingly out of the blue, if you spend some time away from others.

Obstacles to Problem-Solving

Problem-solving is not a flawless process as there are a number of obstacles that can interfere with our ability to solve a problem quickly and efficiently. These obstacles include:

• Assumptions: When dealing with a problem, people can make assumptions about the constraints and obstacles that prevent certain solutions. Thus, they may not even try some potential options.
• Functional fixedness : This term refers to the tendency to view problems only in their customary manner. Functional fixedness prevents people from fully seeing all of the different options that might be available to find a solution.
• Irrelevant or misleading information: When trying to solve a problem, it's important to distinguish between information that is relevant to the issue and irrelevant data that can lead to faulty solutions. The more complex the problem, the easier it is to focus on misleading or irrelevant information.
• Mental set: A mental set is a tendency to only use solutions that have worked in the past rather than looking for alternative ideas. A mental set can work as a heuristic, making it a useful problem-solving tool. However, mental sets can also lead to inflexibility, making it more difficult to find effective solutions.

How to Improve Your Problem-Solving Skills

In the end, if your goal is to become a better problem-solver, it's helpful to remember that this is a process. Thus, if you want to improve your problem-solving skills, following these steps can help lead you to your solution:

• Recognize that a problem exists . If you are facing a problem, there are generally signs. For instance, if you have a mental illness , you may experience excessive fear or sadness, mood changes, and changes in sleeping or eating habits. Recognizing these signs can help you realize that an issue exists.
• Decide to solve the problem . Make a conscious decision to solve the issue at hand. Commit to yourself that you will go through the steps necessary to find a solution.
• Seek to fully understand the issue . Analyze the problem you face, looking at it from all sides. If your problem is relationship-related, for instance, ask yourself how the other person may be interpreting the issue. You might also consider how your actions might be contributing to the situation.
• Research potential options . Using the problem-solving strategies mentioned, research potential solutions. Make a list of options, then consider each one individually. What are some pros and cons of taking the available routes? What would you need to do to make them happen?
• Take action . Select the best solution possible and take action. Action is one of the steps required for change . So, go through the motions needed to resolve the issue.
• Try another option, if needed . If the solution you chose didn't work, don't give up. Either go through the problem-solving process again or simply try another option.

You can find a way to solve your problems as long as you keep working toward this goal—even if the best solution is simply to let go because no other good solution exists.

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Problem-Solving Theory: The Task-Centred Model

• Living reference work entry
• First Online: 12 April 2022
• Cite this living reference work entry

• Blanca M. Ramos 5 &
• Randall L. Stetson 6  

Part of the book series: Social Work ((SOWO))

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This chapter examines the task-centred model to illustrate the application of problem-solving theory for social work intervention. First, it provides a brief description of the problem-solving model. Its historical development and key principles and concepts are presented. Next, the chapter offers a general overview of the crisis intervention model. The task-centred model and crisis intervention share principles and methods drawn from problem-solving theory. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the task-centred model. It reviews its historical background, viability as a framework for social work generalist practice, as well as its applicability with diverse client populations and across cultural settings. The structured steps that guide task-centred implementation throughout the helping process are described. A brief critical review of the model’s strengths and limitations is provided. The chapter concludes with a brief summary and some closing thoughts.

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Trotter C (2010) Task-centred practice in Australia. In Fortune AE, McCallion P, Briar-Lawson K (Eds.), Social work practice research for the 21st century, 235–239. New York: Columbia University Press

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Blanca M. Ramos

State University of New York at Oswego, Oswego, NY, USA

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Ramos, B.M., Stetson, R.L. (2022). Problem-Solving Theory: The Task-Centred Model. In: Hölscher, D., Hugman, R., McAuliffe, D. (eds) Social Work Theory and Ethics. Social Work. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3059-0_9-1

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Functional equation

A functional equation , roughly speaking, is an equation in which some of the unknowns to be solved for are functions . For example, the following are functional equations:

• 1.1 The Inverse of a Function
• 2.1 Cyclic Functions
• 2.2 Problem Examples
• 3.1 Functions and Relations
• 3.2 Injectivity and Surjectivity

Introductory Topics

The inverse of a function.

Intermediate Topics

Cyclic functions.

Now, if we multiply the first equation by 3 and the second equation by 4, and add the two equations, we have:

Problem Examples

• 2006 AMC 12A Problem 18
• 2007 AIME II Problem 14

Advanced Topics

Functions and relations.

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The Functional School of Social Work

Origins of the functional school of social work.

Ed. Note:  This entry is taken almost completely from pages 54-59 in the 2008 publication 100 Years: A Centennial History of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice

By Mark Frazier Lloyd, University of Pennsylvania

Introduction: In the 1930s the Great Depression overwhelmed the nation with unemployment and a staggering volume of social welfare issues. The priorities of Federal, state, and local governments were reordered, with renewal of the economy and assistance to the afflicted moving to the very top of the agenda. Social work executives found themselves recruited by government agencies to fill newly created positions. The Pennsylvania School of Social Work was no exception. In December 1935 Pennsylvania Governor George H. Earle, III announced the appointment of Karl de Schweinitz to the head of the State Emergency Relief Board of Pennsylvania, effective in January 1936. Earle simultaneously established the Pennsylvania Committee on Public Assistance and Relief, which hired Kenneth Pray as its full time Secretary, effective in February 1936. In the winter of 1936 the Pennsylvania School lost both its Director and the Dean of its faculty.

The Trustees of the School elected Virginia P. Robinson to the post of Acting Director. She had served the School as Associate Director since 1919 and had worked her way through seven years in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, earning the University’s Ph.D. in Sociology in 1931. She titled her dissertation “A Changing Psychology in Social Case Work” and the University of North Carolina Press immediately published it in book form. It was an extraordinary work, one which caused a sensation in the field of social work education. Bertha C. Reynolds , Associate Director of the Smith College School for Social Work, reviewed it with approval in the June 1931 issue of the Family Service Association journal, The Family .

Some books sink into the pool of oblivion with scarcely a ripple. Some, for a brief time, are like molten matter cast up by an erupting volcano. Some are like earthquakes, felt but not comprehended at the time and producing no one knows what changes. One only knows that after their coming nothing is the same again. “A Changing Psychology in Social Work” bears the mark of such a book.

On the other hand, Frank J. Bruno ,  a distinguished professor of social work at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, reviewed “A Changing Psychology…” in the January 1933 issue of The American Journal of Sociology . He wrote with evident concern. In his view,

There has always been one school [of thought] which has relied upon differences in personality for the explanation of deviant behavior and another which has emphasized the predominant importance of the social, economic, and political mediums in which development has taken place. Miss Robinson goes nearly to the extreme of the personality hypothesis.…Her statement that psychology and not social science has spoken the last word upon social case work is confirmatory evidence of this allegiance. … The book exhibits the qualities inherent in positive statement of conviction as compared with the attitude of the scholar whose conclusions are tentative and subject to change on the presentation of new evidence. The author seems to have found in the methodology of [Otto] Rank an end to all searchings for method in social interaction. This leads to an uncompromising form of statement, as well as a confidence in the comprehensiveness of the formula which is in marked contrast to the tentative methodologies of most of the contemporary professions.

The Functional School is Born: Virginia Robinson was breaking new ground. Like others who lead a profession in a new direction, she suffered the criticism of many of her peers. Nevertheless, she pressed ahead. She had the courage of her own convictions. She was strengthened by the support of Karl de Schweinitz, Kenneth Pray, and the founder of the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, the psychiatrist Frederick H. Allen, M.D.  Most of all, she enjoyed the committed backing and intellectual powers of her life partner, Jessie Taft . Taft was the one who had met Otto Rank in 1924, during his first visit to the United States. Taft had undergone psychoanalysis with him in 1926-27. She had authored “The Function of a Mental Hygienist in a Children’s Agency,” which she read at the National Conference of Social Work in 1927. She had published “A Changing Psychology in Child Welfare” in the September 1930 issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science . In 1934, after fifteen years at the Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania, she had become a full-time member of the faculty at the Pennsylvania Society of Social Work. In 1936 she had translated and published Rank’s Will Therapy: An Analysis of the Therapeutic Process in Terms of Relationship. Jessie Taft was the person most responsible for developing the “functional school” in social work theory and practice. Virginia Robinson was her partner every step of the way.

As Acting Director of the School, Virginia Robinson moved decisively to elevate the concept of function to the national level. Under her leadership the School inaugurated the Journal of Social Work Process and Volume I, Number 1 was published in November 1937. Titled The Relation of Function to Process in Social Case Work , the volume was edited by Jessie Taft. Robinson later summarized the significance of this publication. It “carried,” she said, “Dr. Taft’s definitive statement of the relation of function to process and illustrated the responsibility she carried as editor for the selection of articles chosen from theses of advanced students or from supervisors or executives who were working with her in exploration of the problems illuminated by this understanding of function. The entire volume bore her imprint.” After ten years of research and experimentation, the functional school was full born.

The turning point in the use of psychology by social workers was the publication, in 1930, of Virginia Robinson’s A Changing Psychology in Social Work. Robinson’s book crystallized the growing discontent many social workers felt with the old, paternalistic models and proposed a new way to synthesize the individual personality and the social environment. Heavily influenced by the psychiatric theories of Otto Rank, Robinson proposed that case work should focus not on planning for the social welfare of the client, not on the client per se (or the environment per se), but on the relationship between the client and the social worker. The client, not the social worker, should be the central actor in the casework drama; the social worker – client relationship was intended to strengthen the client. …

Robinson’s approach was heavily oriented to the client’s emotional adjustment, not to the client’s objective social welfare. Concrete services, home visits, and environmental manipulation by the social worker had little place in her model. Rather, the client chose the agency that offered the services he or she wanted; it was the social worker’s role to enable the client to make that choice wisely and to use the agency effectively. The agency itself became, to Robinson, a “sample situation” within which the client – social worker relationship was developed and played out. It defined and limited the social worker – client relationship; within it, the client would come to know and test himself or herself, his or her limits and strengths. Even the administration of a simple agency function, then, became “individual therapy through a treatment relationship.” …

As the decade wore on…Robinson and her colleague at Penn, Jessie Taft, developed their ideas further. But some of the implications of their rejection of Freudian orthodoxy now began to sink in and many social workers had second thoughts. Caseworkers began to split into two “schools”: the “functional school” (the followers of Robinson and Taft, a group that included Kenneth Pray, Almena Dawley,  Harry Aptekar,  Grace Marcus, and Ruth Smalley) and the more orthodox Freudian “diagnostic” (or “organic” or “psychosocial”) school (which included Gordon Hamilton, Florence Hollis, Lucille Austin, Fern Lowery, and Annette Garrett, among others). Although the functional school remained a small minority, the debate it provoked has had an enormous influence on social work methods and principles. Continuing for more than fifteen years, the debate quickly grew extraordinarily bitter, even vitriolic. By the late forties, graduates of “functional” schools (e.g., the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina) had trouble finding jobs in agencies that adhered to the diagnostic school, and vice versa. …

As the technical aspects of the debate have often been recounted, a brief summary will suffice here. The functional school believed in short-term treatment, focusing on the here and now (and specifically on the client in the agency); the diagnostic school tended toward a long-term therapeutic model based on an in-depth investigation of the client’s life history. The functional school called for “partializing” – focusing only on the immediate issues presented by the client – whereas the diagnostic school insisted on the necessity of examining and treating the “total personality” of the client, even if the help sought by the client was for a limited, practical problem. The functional school eschewed formal diagnosis and the setting of treatment goals, arguing that these would emerge in the course of the relationship; the diagnostic school, by contrast, insisted on differential analysis and a setting of short and long-term goals. The functional school saw the experience of the client in his or her relationship with the social worker within the specific agency setting and how the client used the agency’s functions (hence the name) as the key to personal change; the diagnostic school saw personality transformations – mobilizing the client’s ego strengths, resolving inner conflicts, and so on – as central. In the functional setting the client directed the process of change, whereas the worker was responsible only for his or her own part in helping the client release these processes. To the diagnostic school, the social worker was far more central and directive. The functional school stressed the importance of external structure (agency rules, time limits to therapy, agency fees); the diagnostic school believed in a more open-ended and constraint-free process. In the functional setting, clients were to pattern their experiences in their own unique ways and thus develop their own internal norms; treatment in the diagnostic setting was concerned with the adherence of the client to socially accepted norms.

What stands out in Taft’s defense of the functional school is the belief that she and the other theorists in the school had developed a fully integrated response to Abraham Flexner’s 1915 declaration that social work was not a profession. The functional school had constructed a body of knowledge and formulated methods of research, teaching, and practice which together fulfilled all the definitions of the classic professions. In the 1930s the American Association of Schools of Social Work built up educational standards to that of graduate work associated with and under the direction of a university. The decade was also distinguished by the first articulation of a creative and original philosophy unique to social work. The Pennsylvania School of Social Work stood at the forefront of both movements.

For more information on what was the theory and practice of the “functional school”? A good source is: John H. Ehrenreich, in his 1985 book, The Altruistic Imagination: A History of Social Work and Social Policy in theUnited States .

Source : 100 Years: A Centennial History of the  School of Social Policy & Practice, pp. 54-59 by Mark Frazier Lloyd, University of Pennsylvania

6 Replies to “The Functional School of Social Work”

@Crystal, yes, AND, the functional school also had an extremely sophisticated understanding of psychological process, which was very far ahead of its time and has been lost in much social work today. It was based on Otto Rank’s approach, which at the time was rejected by the mainstream psychoanalytic movement. The irony is that today, the more advanced object-relations and relational psychoanalytic schools are rediscovering much of what Rank had already pioneered…

So while yes, the functional school worked very much in the here-and-now, and was willing to focus on the problems that the client wanted to solve, at the same time their main focus was the offer of a healing presence, comparable in its strength and subtlety to the Winnicottian approach as described by Applegate and Bonovitz. For more on the functional school, I highly recommend going to primary sources, and reading Anita J. Faatz’s book, “The Nature of Choice in the Casework Process”, in addition to Jessie Taft’s original 1933 masterpiece (which is very readable despite the less-than-appealing title, “The Dynamics of Therapy in the Controlled Relationship”.)

@Elham, I appreciate your interest in discovering root traditions… in your search please remember that as this article has pointed out, social work has been a very contested field, so the history of it will be written differently depending on who you are reading…

One more thing about the ongoing relevance of the Functional School… in our present-day U.S. culture, we tend to assume that because something is old, or has fallen out of favor, it therefore has little present-day value. As a counter to that, I want to mention that in Germany today, noted social scientist and educator Burkhard Müller recently published a titled “Professionell helfen: Was das ist und wie man das lernt: Die Aktualität einer vergessenen Tradtion Sozialer Arbeit”. (In English, that means, “The role of professional helper — what it is, and how to learn it: The timeliness of a forgotten tradition of social work.”) It’s all about the work of Jessie Taft and Virginia Robinson, and how their work is more relevant today than ever. It has not yet been translated into English… hopefully it will be available soon! These roots are very strong, relevant, and still have much nourishment to offer us today.

Yes, that’s correct. You can directly trace different social work models and approaches today to the functional and diagnostic schools. For example, to answer your question, Task-centered, problem-solving approaches all have their roots in the Functional Schools. Functional Schools, like Diagnostic Schools, were born out of the development of social case work, but they took on very different approaches. Functional Schools taught that you you centered the client’s interpretation of the problem vs diagnostic approaches which seeks to explore the historical experiences of people’s lives no matter what the client may want to address at the moment. Functional is very client-centered, here and now, and short treatment focused. You can see how task-centered, solution focused, empowerment, and problem-solving approaches are directly connected to the functional schools as they borrow the same core principles for thinking about social work practice.

It’s really helpful for me to learn more about the functional school.Thanks a lot.

Thank you for the nice comment. I hope you continue to visit the site. Jack Hansan

the article was very helpful. thanks a lot i have a question: by considering functional school of social work characteristics can we assert some of newer models such as task-centered and solution-focused model, have their roots in this school? i would be pleased if you can introduce me some books on social work theories roots(i mean which theories and models are predecessors of other theories)

I have been away from social work practice for many years and feel incompetent to reply to your question. I recommend you contact a local graduate school of social work or a recently retired professor of social case work. Good Luck.

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The New Stage

The Causal Approach to Business

In the Era of Artificial Intelligence

Slide content

A Causal Approach to Business

• Developments
• The Causal Approach
• Business Adaptability
• Customer Orientation
• New Contributions
• Binary Actions
• Object Driven Organization
• Enterprise 4.0
• Unicist Strategy
• Pilot Testing
• 4th Industrial Revolution
• People Management
• Intuitive Design
• Business Objects
• Unicist Cobots
• Business Compass
• Keynote Lecture
• Potential Energy
• Personal Use
• Business Cobots Building
• Functionalist Technologies
• Contingency Rooms
• Binary Actions in Business
• Functionalist Design
• Functionalist Principles
• Introduction

Functionalist Approach to Problem Solving

Unicist Root Cause Management introduced an approach for problem solving, facing the management of root causes and avoiding the use of shortcuts used as palliatives, to develop structural solutions.

The use of recurring palliatives in problem solving, when the root causes of problems are unknown, demonstrated to be a fallacious shortcut, frequently used for conjunctural solution building, that produces paradoxical results. 

The unicist approach to problem solving was developed to deal with complex adaptive systems such as social, economic and business processes.

The Unicist Management of Causality

The unicist management of causality is based on the unicist ontology of the complex adaptive systems that describes their nature and defines the concepts that regulate their evolution.

A problem exists when a functionality, that has been defined as possible to be achieved, cannot be fulfilled.

The unicist approach to problem solving defines three types of causes that are integrated in the concept of problem causality.

• Triggering causes: that define the operational causes that generate a problem.
• Necessary causes: that define the root causes of the problem.
• The limit causes: that define the boundaries of what is possible to be achieved.

Different Levels of Solutions

The unicist approach to problem solving defines four levels of solutions that can be achieved according to the level of knowledge of the problems.

It has to be considered that people who need to avoid risks cannot deal with problems’ causality and substitute the knowledge of problems with pre-concepts that allow them to avoid facing the risks of developing solutions.

The different levels of solutions that have been defined are:

Palliatives

Systemic solutions, adaptive solutions.

The natural response of people when an urgent problem appears is to repair it, based on the negative consequences that need to be avoided.

This is a short-term energy saving action to face the solution of problems.

The natural response when people do not have the knowledge to solve specific problems is the use of palliatives to mitigate the consequences of such problems.

This is a short-term energy saving actions when there is a lack of knowledge to solve problems.

The development of systemic solutions is the necessary approach when the problems deal with the efficiency of the processes. In this case, it solves the root causes of the problem, but if the lack of efficiency is produced by dysfunctional efficacy, it will reappear due to the entropy of the solution.

This is the approach to develop structural solutions for problems. It drives to research the fundamentals of efficacy and efficiency and find a solution that integrates the problems, their restricted context and their wide context.

Diego Belohlavek

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute (TURI) has been the world leading private research organization in its segment since 1976. www.unicist.org

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Introduction to Functional Equations: Theory and Problem-solving Strategies for Mathematical Competitions and Beyond

• C. Efthimiou
• Published 13 October 2011
• Mathematics

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Functional relevance as a principle of translation problem-solving.

• School of Foreign Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China

Translation is both an interpretive use of language and problem-solving activity. In his work, Ernst-August Gutt adopts a Relevance-Theoretic approach to unveil the inferential nature of translation as interpretive language use. He holds that in translating a translator aims to seek the interpretive resemblance between the ST (source text) and the TT (target text). However, Gutt does not explain how interpretive resemblance can be achieved when translation problems arise. Textual function refers to the intended cognitive effects that a text yields on the part of the readers. Considering that it is only when the textual outcome of a translation activity is both relevant and functional that it is a successful interpretive use of language, we propose Functional Relevance as a principle of translation problem-solving. Namely, a translator needs to strategize their solutions to translation problems by making the explicatures and implicatures of the TT resemblant enough both to justify its reader’s processing effort and to fulfill the contextualized textual functions of translation. This can be exemplified by two English translations of Chinese medicine pun poems in a pien wen , an archaic literary genre popular in China during the tenth century.

1. Gutt’s relevance-theoretic account of translation

Relevance Theory is a cognitive approach to pragmatics and it aims to account for how the meaning is inferred in the actual use of language ( Wilson and Sperber, 2002 : 45–46). Gutt (2000) uses the theory to investigate translation, which he regards as a type of interlingual interpretive use of language ( Gutt, 2000 : 105). According to Gutt (2000) , the goal of translation is to achieve interpretive resemblance, namely the resemblance between the explicatures and implicatures in the ST and those in the TT (2000: 40). The explicatures refer to propositional enrichments of a logical expression of an utterance ( Yus, 1998 : 316), they are the information that readers could get by analyzing the text alone; the implicatures are contextual assumptions that readers need to recover in order to meet their expectations ( Yus, 1998 : 316), they are the information that readers could only get by inferentially analyzing the text together with the context ( Gutt, 2000 : 40). To realize this goal, a translator either adopts the method of direct translation to make the TT interpretively resemble the ST completely, or selects the method of indirect translation to make the two texts interpretively resemble each other only in relevant aspects (2000: 168–200).

In the past decades, Gutt’s Relevance-Theoretic framework of translation has been widely referenced by translation scholars. However, it does not explain when direct translation or indirect translation is to be employed in translating. Generally, translation is a process of problem-solving ( Pym, 2007 : 44). Gutt’s theory does not address the topic of translation problem solving. Though he insists that a translator keeps their linguistic choices in line with optimal relevance that is dependent on the target language readers’ processing effort and the cognitive effects produced by the TT ( Gutt, 1996 : 241–242), he does not answer the question of what choices for a problem-solving translator to make can guarantee that the effects are sufficient and the processing effort is worthwhile.

It has to be pointed out that adopting Gutt’s approach, Yus (2012 , 2016) , Díaz-Pérez (2013 , 2014 , 2021a , b : 279–302; 108–129), and Moneva and Angeles (2018) have studied the translation problems related to humor, jokes, puns idiolect, and figures of speech such as irony and parody. Yus (2012 , 2016 : 117–147; 240–244) holds that the interpretive resemblance between a joke in the ST and a translated one in the TT can be achieved from the cultural, semantic, and pragmatic aspects. The cultural aspect refers to the unity of shared background assumptions between the author and the audience. The semantic one means the linguistic properties of jokes or humor. The pragmatic aspect, outweighing the other two, includes the audience’s inference and the balance between their processing effort and cognitive effects. Díaz-Pérez (2013 , 2014 : 279; 108) proposes that the selection of strategies in translating puns is governed by the principle of relevance when there is no coincidence between the signifier and the signified across the language boundaries. Namely, a translator will have to evaluate what is more relevant in terms of the content and effect that the puns produce. Moneva and Angeles (2018 : 121–144) contends that the translator’s decision-making in dealing with irony and parody is guided by the relevance-theoretical notion of interpretive resemblance, i.e., the TT readers are expected to work out the implicatures similar to those derived from the ST by the ST readers in relevant respects. These studies, though interesting, do not provide a unified account of translation problem-solving mechanism and they touch little upon the social-cultural, situational and conditioning factors constraining translation, a problem-loaded interpretive use of language. Given this, this research aims to account for how a translator makes decisions to cope with translation problems in light of the Relevance Principle when confronted with these constraining factors.

2. Context as the strategic resource for translation problem-solving

Context is a hearer-centered concept in Relevance Theory ( Monacelli, 2009 : 63; Kecskes, 2014 : 274–275). According to Sperber and Wilson (1995) , context is a cognitive construct and it is a subset of the hearer’s assumptions affecting the interpretation of an utterance ( Sperber and Wilson, 1995 : 15). It encompasses not only the physical environmental factors or the preceding utterance but also the hearer’s expectations about the utterance ( ibid : 15–16). A translator, however, is not only a hearer of the ST but also the constructor of the TT and the one who deals with translation problems ( Díaz-Pérez, 2014 : 108–109). In the process of translation, the major task of a translator is to fill the communicative gap resulting from translation problems ( Yus, 2012 : 126). Especially, the intentionality of the TT is not always in line with that of the ST as the initiator, commissioner, publisher or client may take part in negotiating the purpose of translation in a specific situation ( Nord, 2001 : 19).

In translating, what a translator is confronted with are different types of translation problems and heterogeneous factors including the social-cultural, situational and conditioning ones, together with the subjective ones such as the intentions of the initiator and the translator, the expectations of the target readers, and so on. A translation problem can be defined as an objective or inter-subjective task of language transfer facing every translator (regardless of their abilities and technical equipment; Nord, 2006 : 166–167). Translation problems can be divided into pragmatic, linguistic, textual, and convention-related ones. Pragmatic problems are caused by the disagreement between the function of the ST (source text) and that of the TT (target text); linguistic problems are brought about by the structural differences between the two languages; textual problems result from the salient features of the ST, which cannot be adequately rendered in the target language; convention-related problems come from the differences of the culture-specific norms and conventions ( ibid : 174–177). Of course, translation problems may result from the interaction of different factors.

As a rule, a translator is motivated to carry out a translation activity to meet their needs. Translation activity is actualized through goal-directed actions which are finally realized by a series of routinized operational acts ( Chesterman, 1997 : 89–90). An operational translation act is conditioned by factors including translation problems, the functions, and features of the ST as well as the translator’s habitual translation and language style ( Sang, 2018 : 132). When the translation act is guided by the translator’s intention, namely their needs objectified in a certain situation, it turns into a translation action constrained by situational factors including interpersonal relationship, place, time, etc. ( ibid : 131). When the textual outcome of the translation action not only meets the needs of the translator but also those of the commissioner, publisher, and the reader of the TT, it turns into a meaningful social activity. The activity of translation is governed by socio-cultural factors such as translation norms, ideology, ethics, translation laws, and so on ( ibid : 130). These heterogeneous factors available in the translator’s cognitive environment make up the context of translation. These factors are not static but work dynamically as the cognitive resource for the translator to build the TT ( Baker, 2006 : 332). The context, in other words, is the strategic resource for translational decision-making ( Baker, 2006 : 328). As the major part of translational decision-making is to strategize the solutions to translation problems, the context of translation can also be regarded as the strategic resource for translation problem-solving. Admittedly, context is a blurred concept. In the actual use of language, it is crystalized by contextualized textual functions.

3. Contextualized textual functions as a basis for translators’ decision-making

Written text-based use of language is an activity in which a motivated language user transforms an idea, thought, attitude, or feelings into a meaningful textual product with the help of other participants such as readers, transmitters, or publishers ( Sang, 2019 : 543). A language-use activity is meaningful or functional on the condition that the textual outcome meets the expectations and the needs of all the participants. In other words, it is an activity in which a language user externalizes their needs while taking into consideration the socio-cultural, situational, and conditioning factors together with the needs of the other participants. In the process of the activity, the language user follows the prospective textual functions to make linguistic choices ( Sang, 2019 : 538). Generally, the textual function refers to the cognitive effects or contextual effects that a text or part of a text is intended to yield on the part of the reader in a communicative situation. As for any instance of successful language use, the cognitive effects that its textual outcome yields not only meet the reader’s expectation but also satisfy the needs of the speaker and other participants.

According to Relevance Theory, cognitive effects come from the synthesis of the new and given information, and they are produced when the hearer/reader’s assumptions about an utterance/text are strengthened, confirmed, or eliminated ( Sperber and Wilson, 1995 : 109; 112). In other words, cognitive effects can be defined as ‘change in one’s awareness’ when there is a crucial interaction between the new and old information ( Gutt, 1996 : 241–242). As for a well-organized text, the cognitive effects that it yields on the part of the reader can be obtained only by inferring both the text and context ( Gutt, 1996 : 241). In this sense, the cognitive effects that a text yields precondition its functionality, that is, the greater its cognitive effects, the more relevant it is and the more meaningful or functional it is to the participants.

In the activity of language use, the textual functions that a language user follows are contextualized and hierarchically stratified into the social function and situational function of the TT (at the higher strata) and the conventional function of textual tools (at the basic stratum). When there is any incongruity among these functions, they need to prioritize the one at a higher stratum ( Sang, 2019 : 538). Social textual function refers to the cognitive effects which not only satisfy the needs of all the participants in the language use activity but also conform to the social rules governing the activity. The situational textual function is the cognitive effects intended by the author to yield on the part of the reader in a certain situation. The conventional function is defined as the cognitive effects that the same genre of text conventionally produces on the part of average readers. The conventional function can also be roughly divided into three types: referential, expressive, and persuasive ( Sang, 2019 : 545). Generally, a text has quite a few functions but one of them always plays a predominant role ( ibid : 545). A language user follows the leading textual function to make linguistic choices to build the textual properties, that is, the emphasis of their linguistic choices is laid on the content of a text whose major function is to produce mainly referential or informative effects, on the form of a text whose dominant function is expressive, and on the appealing effects of a text whose function is mainly persuasive ( Reiss, 2000 : 26). For example, the function of a literary text is expressive and the author usually focuses the linguistic choices on the formal textual features producing artistic and aesthetic effects ( Reiss, 2000 : 34). As for politicians’ public speeches, their main function is to appeal to the audience for their support, the language users would prioritize their linguistic choices that may yield a persuasive effect. Added to that, as each textual component may play a different structural role to fulfill the global function of the text, the structural importance of the textual component needs to be assessed in making choices.

Translation, as Gutt (1996) points out, is a type of interpretive language use ( Gutt, 1996 : 251). During the process of this language use, a translator makes decisions by the contextualized textual functions of the prospective TT which crystallizes not only the subjective factors such as the author’s intention, the readers’ expectation, but also the socio-cultural, situational, and conditioning factors ones ( Nord, 2006 : 77). The contextualized textual functions in a translation activity are hierarchically stratified into the social function and situational function of translation as well as the function of the ST. If there is any disagreement among them, a translator would prioritize the one at a higher stratum ( Sang, 2018 : 134–135). The social function of translation refers to the cognitive effects that not only meet the needs of the translator, commissioner, publisher, and the TT readers but also comply with the social rules governing the translation activity. The situational function of translation is the cognitive effects that the TT is intended by the translator to produce on the target language readers in a specific situation. When there is any disagreement among the contextualized textual functions, a translator would prioritize the social function of translation over its situational function, which they would put ahead of the function of the ST ( Sang, 2018 : 130–131). For example, if a translator is commissioned to translate a classified document on a new scientific invention without the authorization of the inventor, the referential cognitive effects that the TT is intended to produce are illegitimate as the translation action breaches the Law of Intellectual Property Rights, one of the social rules governing the translation activity. In this case, the translator has to base their decisions on the social function of translation and re-negotiate with the commissioner or the initiator.

Translation is essentially a process of problem-solving. Contextualized textual functions, of course, are also one of the strategic bases of translation problem-solving. For instance, to acquaint himself with the Chinese history of the Northern Dynasties, a French historian commissions a translator to translate from Chinese into French the classic narrative poem The Song of Mu Lan (木蘭辭) which was based on a legend of the historic period. There arises a pragmatic translation problem as the ST is a literary text whose function is mainly expressive (i.e., to produce the artistic and aesthetic cognitive effects), but the cognitive effects that the TT is expected to yield are largely referential and informative. To solve this problem, the translator would prioritize the textual function of translation over that of the ST and they may choose the linguistic means that ensure the intelligibility of the TT content at the sacrifice of the formal features of the ST.

Admittedly, textual functions are by definition the intended cognitive effects that the textual outcome of a language use activity produces on the part of the reader. Although contextualized textual functions serve as a basis of a language user’s decision-making or a translator’s problem-solving, they are not helpful to spell out how the cognitive effects are produced on the part of the reader. This is where the Principle of Relevance comes into play.

4. Functional relevance as a principle of translation problem-solving

As discussed above, the context of translation is the strategic resource to handle translation problems. To be specific, a translator strategizes their solutions to translation problems by the hierarchical contextualized textual functions which not only embody the subjective factors such as the needs and the expectations of the participants, but also the socio-cultural, situational, and conditioning factors. As textual function is identified as the cognitive effects that a text is intended to produce on the part of the reader, the greater the cognitive effects that the TT yields, the more relevant it is to the target readers and the more functional or meaningful the translation activity is to all the participants.

The Principle of Relevance highlights the equilibrium between cognitive effects and processing effort. As Sperber and Wilson (1995) points out, relevance is a matter of degree (1995: 123). Maximal relevance means that the greatest cognitive effects are obtained at the cost of the lowest processing effort. Optimal relevance refers to the fact that the hearer’s expended processing effort is justified by adequate cognitive effects ( ibid : 270). The quantity of cognitive effects and processing effort, however, does not qualify the cognitive effects as what the participants of a language use activity need or expect. For instance, William Carlos Williams’s poem ‘This is Just to Say’ ( This just to say/I have eaten/the plums/that were in/the icebox/and which/you were probably/saving for breakfast/Forgive me/they were delicious/so sweet/and so cold ) can either be translated into a daily note or a literary text ( Arrojo, 2005 : 239–242). If it is translated to be included in an anthology of literature, the version of daily note will not be functional or meaningful at all even though it can yield greater cognitive effects at the cost of lower processing effort.

Relevance theorists make a distinction between descriptive language use and interpretive language use. An utterance is a descriptive use of language when its propositional form is true of the state of affairs. An utterance is an interpretive use of language when it is intended to represent what someone else said or thought ( Sperber and Wilson, 1995 : 228–231). Translation, from a Relevance Theory Perspective, is an interlingual interpretive use of language ( Gutt, 2004 : 105). The TT is the product of interpretive language use as it interpretively resembles the ST. Interpretive resemblance, which depends on the number of explicatures and implicatures that the two texts share, is the criterion of translation ( Díaz-Pérez, 2014 : 123). In translating, a translator aims at either achieving the complete interpretive resemblance between the ST and the TT or making the explicatures and implicatures in the TT adequately resemble those in the ST in relevant respects ( Gutt, 2004 : 169–171).

Interpretive resemblance, however, does not guarantee that a translation is functional. Taking the Chinese-French translation of The Song of Mu Lan (木蘭辭) for another example, the formal features of the ST weigh heavily in producing implicatures. However, if the textual functions of translation have not been taken into consideration, no matter how much resemblance of the implicatures is achieved, and no matter how great the cognitive effects the TT yields, it is likely that the translation still will not be meaningful. This is because what the commissioner and the French historian expect is mainly intelligible historic information, not the resemblant implicatures in the TT. In fact, the formal features related to the rhyme scheme of the ST are impossible to be adequately rendered in the target language. If a translator goes all out to achieve the resemblance of the implicatures derived from these features, she has but to sacrifice the intelligibility of the TT.

Translation is a meaningful interpretive use of language if and only if the processing effort that the TT costs is justified by the adequate cognitive effects which fulfill the hierarchically contextualized textual functions (i.e., the social translation function, the situational translation function, and the function of the ST). In other words, it is only when the textual outcome is both relevant and functional that the translation activity is a successful inter-lingual interpretive use of language. In translating, therefore, a translator needs to aim to build a TT with adequate explictures and implicatures that are of optimal relevance and functionality. Their choices of translation methods, strategies to solve translation problems, and linguistic procedures to construct the TT need to conform to the Principle of Relevance and contextualized textual functions. This can be illustrated as follows,

As shown in Figure 1 , a translator chooses the methods, strategies, and procedures to ensure that the TT and the ST share as many explicatures and implicatures as possible. Translation method embodies the superordinate goal of translation activity and it is the global plan for the whole process of the interpretive use of language ( Molina et al., 2002 : 508). Translation strategy refers to the conscious plan to tackle translation problems ( Zabalbeascoa, 2000 : 120). Translation procedures are the linguistic means or techniques employed to build the TT. Translation method and strategy are realized through translation procedures.

Figure 1 . Mechanism of decision-making in translating.

Given the translation problems resulting from the linguistic, cultural, textual, pragmatic, and convention-related differences between the ST and the TT, it is not always possible to make the explicatures and implicatures of the TT completely resemble those of the ST. At this point, a translator would have to select the strategies to guarantee that the cognitive effects not only justify all the TT reader’s processing effort but also conform to the hierarchically contextualized textual functions. If there is any disagreement among them, the textual function at a higher stratum, namely social function or situational function of translation needs to be prioritized.

As translation problems rest on the textual components of specific structural importance to the global textual function, the problems of the same type in the same text may be tackled differently due to their structural roles in shaping the global textual function. Based on this, how translation problems are solved can be further explained as follows,

As illustrated in Figure 2 , in translating it is not always the case that the explicatures and implicatures of the TT can be made to resemble those of the ST completely as translation problems get in the way. To tackle the problems attached to specific textual components, a translator needs to select the strategies and procedures to guarantee that the explicatures and implicatures of the TT not only are resemblant enough to justify all the TT reader’s processing effort but also conform with the structural importance to the contextualized textual functions. This is the principle of Functional Relevance, which governs the way a translator selects strategies to solve translation problems.

Figure 2 . Functional relevance as principle of translation problem-solving.

5. Exemplification: Two English translations of a Chinese poem with medicine puns in a pien wen

Functional Relevance as a principle of translation problem-solving can be exemplified by two English translations of a Chinese poem with medicine puns in a pien wen . Tun-Huang manuscripts are ancient Chinese documents that were unearthed in the Mogao grottos of Tun-Huang in northwest China in the early 1900s. Among the manuscripts are bundles of literary texts labeled as pien wen (變文). Pien wen is a literary genre of popular narrative widely employed in the tenth century of China. Pien wen is written in prosimetric style (i.e., a combination of prose and verse) and the language is semicolloquial ( Mair, 1983 : 5). There is no doubt that pien wen itself may pose a convention-related translation problem in translating.

Arthur Waley translated Wu Tzu-hsü (伍子胥變文), a typical piece of pien wen , into English in 1960. Victor H. Mair re-translated it in 1983. This piece of pien wen is centered on Wu Tzu-hsü, a historic figure who lived in the late sixth and early fifth century B.C. The story begins with an incident: the King of Ch’u was annoyed by Wu She, Wu Tzu-hsü’s father, for he criticized the king for having married his son’s fiancée. The king incriminated the whole family of Wu She and Wu Tzu-hsü became a fugitive. During his exile, Wu Tzu-hsü managed to meet his long-waiting wife. To conceal the identity of being a fugitive from the passerby, the couple pretended to be strangers by conversing in the form of a poem with Chinese medicine puns, which is one of the traditional genres of classical Chinese poetry. The poem of this genre sounds like a verse made up of the names of herbs and minerals used in Chinese medicine. It can be interpreted either in terms of the explicatures, namely the referential meaning of the medicine names, or the implicatures derived from these names or their homophones. In most cases, what is intended to express is none other than the implicatures, built through an inferential synthesis of the text and the context. In the pien wen , the wife of Wu Tzu-hsü produced a poem whose first stanza goes as follows,

其妻遂作藥名詩問曰:妾是 仵茄 之婦 細辛 ，早 仕於梁 ，就禮未及 當歸 ，使妾閒居 獨活 。 蒿莨薑芥 ， 澤瀉 無鄰；仰歎 檳榔 ，何時 遠志 。( Wang, 1957 : 10; Italicized for emphasis).

The excerpt above involves 11 Chinese medicine names: ‘仵茄’, ‘細辛’, ‘仕於梁’ (‘禹餘糧’), ‘當歸’, ‘獨活’, ‘蒿’, ‘莨薑’, ‘芥’, ‘澤瀉’, ‘檳榔’, ‘遠志’. Their scientific names are ‘Eleutherococcus brachypus’, ‘Asarum sieboldii’, ‘Limonitum’, ‘Angelica’, ‘Radix Angelicae pubescentis’, ‘Artemisia’, ‘Chinese galangal’, ‘Brassica juncea’, ‘Rhizoma alismatis’, ‘Areca catechu’, and ‘Polygala tenuifolia’. Among these medicine names, the homophone of ‘仵茄’ is ‘伍家’ (the Wu family). The homophone of ‘細辛’ is ‘媳新’ (a newlywed wife). “仵茄之婦細辛” suggests that she was a newlywed wife of the Wu family. ‘仕於梁’ (word for word translation: working as an official in Liang) suggests that Wu Tzu-hsü served in the court of the Kingdom of Liang. ‘就禮’ means ‘consummating marriage’ in Chinese and ‘當歸’ means ‘that he should go back’. ‘就禮未及當歸’ implies that Wu Tzu-hsü had to go back before his wedding could be consummated. The word for word translation of ‘獨活’ is ‘living alone’. ‘使妾閒居獨活’ means that Wu Tzu-hsü left his wife alone at home.

The sentence ‘蒿 (wormwood) 莨薑 (galangal) 芥 (mustard)’ means that the yard and the field were blanketed by overgrown weeds. ‘宅歇’ (word for word translation: living in a house) is the homophone of ‘澤瀉’ (Alisma). ‘無鄰’ means ‘without neighbors’ in Chinese. By ‘澤瀉無鄰’, there are hints that the wife lived in a house without neighbors. The homophone of ‘檳榔’ (betel nut) is ‘賓郎’ which means ‘her husband working in a country other than his motherland’. ‘仰歎檳榔’ can be interpreted as ‘I raise my head and sigh for the sake of my husband who works in a country other than his motherland’. ‘何時遠志’ means ‘remembering me whenever you are faraway’ in Chinese. These implicatures could only be inferred by combining the text with the context.

A pun is a figure of speech that a special rhetorical effect is produced by using one word whose homophone or homonym may elicit two different well-matched meanings. As there is always no equivalence between the homophone or homonym of a word in one language and that in another, the puns in the ST, to some extent, are untranslatable and they bring about a translation problem. The poem of Chinese medicine puns, undoubtedly, poses a textual translation problem as it is a salient textual feature impossible to be adequately rendered in the target language. The English words for these Chinese medicine names or their homophonies are not helpful at all to build the above-mentioned implicatures. To deal with this translation problem, Waley (1960) inserted a narratorial commentary explicitly explaining the poem of Chinese medicine puns as follows,

The wife then shows that she knows who he is and what has been happening to him in a passage consisting largely of the names of medicines, both vegetable and mineral, used punningly. For example, tang-kuei means a kind of angelica, but also ‘you must go back’. Tu-huo means another kind of angelica, but also ‘live alone’. Wu Tzu-hsü replies in the same vein. This passage is of course untranslatable, as the plays on words cannot be reproduced in English. ( Waley, 1960 : 35-36)

The commentary gives an account of what the poem is about, what features it has, and why it was not fully translated, that is, the plays on words in the ST are ‘untranslatable’. The implicatures related to the Chinese medicine puns were made into the explicatures in the TT.

As previously discussed, Wu Tzu-hsü is a literary text whose function is mainly expressive, that is, to produce artistic and aesthetic cognitive effects on the part of the reader ( cf. Reiss, 2000 : 34). As a rule, the formal features of a literary text are purely intentional and they weigh heavily in a translator’s decision-making ( Sang, 2006 : 48; 50). However, very little was known to English readers about the manuscript of pien we n in the 1960s and it was the first time that pien wen was translated into English ( Waley, 1960 : 238). The English readers, at that time, were expecting the information about the story itself more than the artistic and aesthetic values of the newly discovered manuscript. Given the vast amount of translation problems caused by the linguistic, textual, and cultural differences, Waley (1960) estimated that the contextualized textual function of translation was largely informative rather than expressive. He, therefore, changed the expressive textual function into the informative one and intended his translation for the general readers (1960: 238). To ensure that they could get adequate information about the story content at the cost of unnecessary processing effort, he avoided ‘discussion of linguistic and textual problems’ to a large extent ( Waley, 1960 : 238–239). Though the poem is of high structural importance to the expressive function of a literary text, its role will be decreased in the TT whose social function is made largely informative. This is why he put in the explanatory commentary above to handle the translation problem. In other words, to solve the textual translation problem caused by the poem of Chinese medicine puns, the translator made the implicatures into explicatures to keep the cognitive effects in line with the structural importance to the contextualized textual functions and the general readers could get enough positive effects without taking too much processing effort.

Twenty-three years later, Mair (1983) retranslated the poem in Wu Tzu-hsü as follows,

I, Belladonna, am the wife of a man named Wahoo, / who early became a mandrake in Liang. / Before our matrimony vine could be consomméted, he had to go back, / Leaving me, his wife, to dwell here ruefully alone. / The mustard has not been cut, the flaxseed bed remains unvisited- / Hemlocked in here without any neighbors, I raised my head and / sighed for my Traveler's Joy: / “Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme- / I pray that he'll forget me not!” / ( Mair, 1983 : 135)

It is noteworthy that up to 1960 when Arthur Waley translated the pien wen from Chinese into English, little research work had been done on the Tun-Huang manuscripts though Marc Auriel Stein and Paul Pelliot took thousands of them to London and Paris in the early 20th century ( Waley, 1960 : 238). However, in the year 1983 when Victor H. Mair re-translated the pien wen , there was a great development in the international studies on the Tun-Huang manuscripts which attracted an increasing number of English readers specializing in sinology and Chinese literature. There is no doubt that the contextualized functions of Mair’s re-translation are different from those of Waley’s ‘debut translation’. The participants of the translation activity including the author, the publisher, and the specialist readers expected that the TT could produce the same artistic and aesthetic effects as the source literary text, and the explicatures and implicatures of the TT could resemble those of the ST as much as possible.

As shown above, the first stanza of Mair’s translation also includes 13 names of medicinal herbs: ‘belladonna’, ‘wahoo’, ‘mandrake’, ‘matrimony vine’, ‘mustard’, ‘flaxseed’, ‘hemlock’, ‘traveler’s joy’, ‘forget me not’, ‘parsley’, ‘sage’, ‘rosemary’, and ‘thyme’. Although there is no one-to-one correspondence between the Chinese and English herbal names which can be used in the same punning way, these names in the TT enable it to resemble the ST in terms of the explicatures and implicatures as well as the textual features of the poem with medicine puns. ‘Belladonna’ is not only the name of a medicinal herb but also the given name of a woman. ‘Wahoo’, the homophone of ‘伍侯’ (i.e., Lord of Wu), refers to Wu Tzu-hsü. ‘Mandrake’ sounds like ‘mandarin’ (senior official), which implies that Wu Tzu-hsü was a senior official in the kingdom of Liang. In ‘matrimony vine’, ‘matrimony’ means marriage. The sentence that ‘before our matrimony vine could be consomméted, he had to go back’ implies that before they could consummate their marriage, Wu Tzu-hsü had to go back to Liang. ‘Hemlocked’ sounds like ‘home-locked’, suggesting that the wife locked herself at home and lived alone without neighbors. In ‘sighed for my Traveler’s Joy’, ‘Traveler’s Joy’ could not only be understood as a garden plant but also as the ‘traveler’ Wu Tzu-hsü who brought his wife joy. ‘Forget me not’ can be considered both as a flowering plant (i.e., Myosotis sylvatica) and as the wife’s praying that her traveler husband would ‘forget her not’. It is noteworthy that ‘parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme’ happen to be the words of ‘Scarborough Fair’, an England folk song which may remind the TT readers of the implicatures about Wu Tzu-hsü wife’s praying as the following line in the song is ‘Remember me to one who lives there’. There is no doubt that the implicatures could only be built by interpreting the herbal names (their homophonies or the words that sound alike) together with the context.

As discussed above, Wu Tzu-hsü is a literary text whose major function is expressive. This is identical to the contextualized function of Mair’s translation, which was expected to produce resemblant aesthetic and artistic cognitive effects. It is clear that the poem of medicine puns, which poses a textual translation problem, is of great structural importance to fulfill the function of translation. To solve this problem, the translator went all out to restructure an English poem with the punning names of medicinal herbs. The explicatures and implicatures resembling those of the ST could be derived in the same vein. Though the readers of Victor Mair’s translation, compared with those of Arthur Waley’s, needed to expend more effort to process the poem of medicine puns, they could get the adequate cognitive effects they wished for.

Generally, translation problems rest on the specific textual components of the ST. As exemplified by the translated Chinese poem of medicine puns, the translators strategized their solutions to the textual problem by making the TT adequately relevant to the target readers and interpretively resembling the ST in light of the structural importance of the textual component to the translation function. In other words, the extent to which the ST interpretively resembles the TT in relevant respects is dependent on the structural importance to contextualized functions of translation.

6. Conclusion

Translation is an interpretive use of language. Ideally, a translated text and its source text are thought to share all the explicatures and implicatures. However, given the linguistic, textual, pragmatic, or convention-related translation problems, the interpretive resemblance can only be achieved both in relevant and functional respects, that is to say, a translator needs to strategize their solutions by making the explicatures and implicatures of the TT resemblant enough both to justify the TT reader’s processing effort and to fulfill the contextualized textual functions of translation. Functional Relevance, in this sense, can be termed as a principle for a translator to select strategies to solve translation problems. As for the choice of a translation method, it is dependent on contextualized textual functions. If the function of the TT agrees with that of the ST, the translator would choose the method of direct translation. Otherwise, they would select the method of indirect translation.

Additionally, Functional Relevance may also be true of other written text-based language uses. Namely, the users’ linguistic choices to build the explicatures or implicatures into the TT are not only dependent on their estimated balance between the reader’s processing effort and the positive cognitive effects, but also on how importantly their choices contribute to the contextualized hierarchical textual functions (i.e., the social function and situational function of the TT and the conventional function of textual tools).

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

This research was supported by National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 20AZD129).

Conflict of interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: relevance, functionality, interpretive resemblance, translation problem, poem with medicine puns

Citation: Sang Z (2022) Functional relevance as a principle of translation problem-solving. Front. Psychol . 13:1073532. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1073532

Received: 18 October 2022; Accepted: 09 December 2022; Published: 23 December 2022.

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Copyright © 2022 Sang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Sustainable innovative design of elderly-friendly smart medical products: an integrated model.

1. Introduction

• Based on the fuzzy Kano model, Kansei engineering, and TRIZ, this study proposes a sustainable innovation design framework currently lacking in the field of smart healthcare products for the elderly. This framework addresses the deficiency in Kansei engineering’s application to product design, which often neglects the innovativeness of design solutions, and it complements the TRIZ field by accounting for users’ emotional needs. This provides methodological guidance for the sustainable innovative design of other product types;
• By innovatively using the systematic classification function of the fuzzy Kano model, this study addresses the irrationality in the screening process of core words of emotional needs in the traditional semantic differential method, thereby enhancing the significance level of core words of emotional needs in improving user satisfaction.
• To achieve sustainable innovation in the design of elderly-friendly smart medical products, enabling continuous iteration and optimization to meet the complex and changing emotional needs of the elderly;
• To provide a theoretical basis and practical guidance for the government and related industries in formulating policies on CMEC, promoting the innovation of elder-friendly smart medical products, and improving the quality of elderly care services.

2. Literature Review

2.1. sustainable innovative design of elderly-friendly smart medical products, 2.2. kansei engineering, 2.3. fuzzy kano model, 2.5. sustainable innovation design framework for elderly-friendly smart medical products, 3. research framework, 3.1. analysis of emotional needs of the elderly, 3.1.1. elderly-friendly smart medical product attribute category analysis, 3.1.2. construction of vocabulary of emotional needs, 3.2. extraction of core emotional needs of the elderly, 3.2.1. construction of key vocabulary of emotional needs, 3.2.2. construction of core vocabulary of emotional needs, 3.3. generation of sustainable innovative design solutions for elderly-friendly smart medical products, 4. empirical case studies, 4.1. analysis of emotional needs of the elderly regarding smart blood pressure monitors, 4.1.1. smart blood pressure monitor product attribute category analysis, 4.1.2. construction of vocabulary of emotional needs for smart blood pressure monitor products, 4.2. extraction of core emotional needs of the elderly regarding smart blood pressure monitors, 4.2.1. construction of key vocabulary of emotional needs for smart blood pressure monitor products, 4.2.2. construction of library of core emotional needs for smart blood pressure monitor products, 4.3. generation and realization of sustainable innovative design solutions for smart blood pressure monitor products, 4.3.1. generation stage of sustainable innovation design for smart blood pressure monitor products, 4.3.2. realization stage of sustainable innovation design solution for smart blood pressure monitor products, 5. discussion, 5.1. research advantages, 5.2. policy implications, 5.2.1. implications for enterprise-level research.

• Deepen the understanding of user needs and product positioning: before proposing innovative design solutions for the smart blood pressure monitor, this study had already identified that elderly users prefer three key product attributes: “portability”, “appearance design”, and “functionality”. This conclusion was drawn after extensively collecting and analyzing smart blood pressure monitor pictures and descriptions from major e-commerce platforms and academic literature. This comprehensive understanding of user needs and product positioning ensured a smooth connection between demands and the design. Hence, enterprises must deeply understand the specific needs and preferences of elderly users through meticulous market research. This includes understanding their basic needs, expected needs, and attractive needs in the use of medical products. Enterprises should position their products according to these needs to ensure that the design direction matches the actual needs of the users;
• Promote the integration of Kansei engineering and technological innovation: the core idea of the integrated framework combining the fuzzy Kano model, Kansei engineering, and TRIZ is to ensure that the product innovation process is guided by users’ emotional needs. For example, in designing a smart blood pressure monitor, we first identified three core emotional needs: “no assembly required”, “small”, and “concise data display”. These needs were then mapped to propose four innovative design solutions (S1, S2, S3, and S4) for the smart blood pressure monitor, ensuring that the designs meet the emotional needs of the elderly while also maintaining innovation. Thus, when designing elderly-friendly smart medical products, enterprises should integrate the concept of Kansei engineering into the innovation process and should consider the emotional value and innovative design of the products. This implies that the product should not only fulfill the medical needs with regard to functionality but also bring comfort and pleasure to the elderly users in terms of sensory experience;
• Establishment of a management mechanism for continuous innovation and improvement: the integrated framework of the fuzzy Kano model, Kansei engineering, and TRIZ proposed in this study is merely a method to facilitate sustainable innovation in the design of elderly-friendly smart medical products. However, to truly achieve sustainable innovation in product design, fostering innovative thinking within the design team is the key driving force. Therefore, enterprises should establish a management mechanism for continuous innovation and improvement and encourage team members to use TRIZ and other innovation methods to resolve problems in the design and production process. Enterprises need to cultivate the problem awareness and problem-solving skills of the employees and improve the team’s ability to think creatively and solve problems systematically. Meanwhile, the enterprise should establish a mechanism to quickly respond to market changes, collect user feedback in a timely manner, and use it to rapidly improve products for achieving continuous product iteration and optimization.

5.2.2. Implications for Government-Level Research

• Facilitate collaborative innovation among industry, universities, and research institutes: the practical foundation of the sustainable innovation design framework for elderly-friendly smart medical products is not yet particularly solid, and the innovative design solutions for the smart blood pressure monitor remain at the conceptual stage, requiring further practical validation. In fact, advancing the elderly-friendly smart medical products industry requires close collaboration among various departments and entities. In this process, the government should play the role of a bridge to promote cooperation among enterprises, universities, research institutes, and other relevant parties to jointly promote the sustainable and innovative design of elderly-friendly smart medical products. The government can strengthen exchanges and cooperation among various parties by establishing innovation platforms, funding joint R&D projects, and organizing industry exchange meetings. In addition, the government can promote education and training programs for cultivating talent with expertise in elderly-friendly design and smart medical technology to support the long-term development of this industry;
• Encourage the demonstration and promotion of the application of smart medical products in the field of CMEC: in the process of collecting and analyzing the emotional needs of smart blood pressure monitor users, this study found that many elderly users experience anxiety about using smart devices. To address this issue, the government can encourage the demonstration and promotion of the application of elderly-friendly smart medical products in the field of CMEC through the establishment of demonstration zones and demonstration projects. This approach would provide companies with a practical platform to gather user feedback and optimize product performance, thereby significantly reducing the resistance elderly users may feel toward using these products. The government can also raise public awareness of elderly-friendly smart medical products through media publicity and public education to promote social recognition and acceptance of these products;
• Encourage cross-sectoral collaboration to integrate medical and elderly resources: elderly-friendly smart medical products are just one aspect of the broader CMEC services. To accelerate the development of CMEC, the government should play a role in cross-sectoral coordination and integrate resources in the fields of medical care, elderly care, science, and technology. By establishing a cross-sectoral collaboration platform to promote information sharing, resource integration, and collaborative innovation, the government can help enterprises better understand the needs of the elderly while providing them with the necessary support, such as market access, qualifications, and professional guidance.

5.3. Research Limitations and Future Prospects

6. conclusions.

• In the design of elderly-friendly smart medical products, the emotional needs of users provide the direction for product innovation, and the innovation of product design solutions is a strong guarantee for meeting these needs. The mutual connection between them is key to achieving sustainable innovation in the design of elderly-friendly smart medical products;
• The integration of Kansei engineering and TRIZ enables the mapping of users’ emotional needs to innovative design solutions for elderly-friendly smart medical products. The fuzzy Kano model effectively addresses the inherent limitations of the semantic differential method, enhancing overall user satisfaction;
• The innovative design of the smart blood pressure monitor based on the sustainable innovation design framework can solve the development problems of upstream suppliers and the sales problems of downstream retailers. More importantly, the designed device was popular among the elderly, confirming that the integrated framework can be used to guide product design and the design scheme development process for smart blood pressure monitors and further verifying the feasibility of the integrated framework for promoting sustainable innovative design of elderly-friendly smart medical products;
• The sustainable innovative design of elderly-friendly smart medical products in this study considers the emotional needs of the elderly, which not only can help the elderly maintain an independent life and enhance their self-management ability through iterative optimization of elderly-friendly smart medical product design and the provision of personalized services, significantly reducing the pressure on community health service centers and alleviating the current situation of the uneven distribution of medical resources, but also promotes the collection and analysis of relevant medical and elderly health data, providing valuable information resources for policymakers and promoting the development of intelligent CMEC.

Author Contributions

Institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

Appendix C. Smart Blood Pressure Monitor Product Satisfaction Questionnaire

Click here to enlarge figure

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Share and Cite

Shie, A.-J.; Xu, E.-M.; Ye, Z.-Z.; Meng, Q.-F.; Wu, Y.J. Sustainable Innovative Design of Elderly-Friendly Smart Medical Products: An Integrated Model. Sustainability 2024 , 16 , 7580. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16177580

Shie A-J, Xu E-M, Ye Z-Z, Meng Q-F, Wu YJ. Sustainable Innovative Design of Elderly-Friendly Smart Medical Products: An Integrated Model. Sustainability . 2024; 16(17):7580. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16177580

Shie, An-Jin, En-Min Xu, Zhen-Zhen Ye, Qing-Feng Meng, and Yenchun Jim Wu. 2024. "Sustainable Innovative Design of Elderly-Friendly Smart Medical Products: An Integrated Model" Sustainability 16, no. 17: 7580. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16177580

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