A Howard Gruber Lexicon

 

Aha Erlebnis	Emphasis in the study of creativity on "sudden moments of insight, dramatic reorganizings of ideas"--on "Eureka experiences" (ORA 41-42).
Bracketing	"The technique creative people use to handle part of a problem they cannot yet solve" (Gardner).
Case Study	"An intensive examination of the working of a single mind" (Howard Gardner).
Conceptual Framework	The underlying, but often tacit, intellectual foundation of a creative individual's evolving thought.
Creativity	A supposed "set of properties . . . a person has in a certain amount and carries around with him." This is not Gruber's subject. "The question is really not the 'ivity' of it--the property list--but how people go about doing it" (FES 175).
Developmental Curve	The transformation of the life in the work and work in the life over time in the development of a creative individual.
Domains	For Piaget, domains include causality, time, space, object, chance, number, etc.
Evolving Systems Approach	The belief that a creative person is a system of loosely coupled subsystems--briefly knowledge, purpose, and affect" and that each of these is governed by "a partially independent organization, different roles, and different relevant times scales" working in "loose coupling" not as a "tightly meshed set of gears" (FES 175-76).
Good Moves	Openings (metaphor is from chess) that "set the stage for the protracted creative work of which it is only a part" (FES 172).
Heuristics	Strategies of discovery.
Images of Wide Scope	"Metaphors that hold the key to a creative breakthrough" (Gardner). "There is probably a place for a special term such "image of wide scope," distinct from metaphor, to refer to the potential vehicle of a metaphor that has not yet been formulated or to refer to supple schematization (such as "network") that might enter into a number of metaphors" (IOW 256).
Intellectual Work	Manifests itself in moments, episodes, projects, tasks, and enterprises.
Microgenesis	The production, in a process not yet understood, of creative ideas over time at the deepest levels of the mind.
Network of Enterprises	"The multiple ongoing interests that thread through the intellectual life of a creative individual" (Gardner).
Novelty	A primary component of the world view of a creative person which allows for the very possibility of creative work.
Point of View	A "certain special perspective on the world" (FES 178). Each creative person "looks at the world from a special place. He has a point of view that permits him to see things in a new way, to see new questions, new opportunities, new directions to go in" (FES 178).
Protocols	The identifiable procedures/work habits of a creative individual.
Telescoping	When a "complex event, extended in time, is compressed into a point-instant" (ORA 51).
The Three 'B's' of Creatvity	The bed, the bath, the bus (ORA 41).
Thought-form	Keegan's term for "the incarnation of a theme within an individual" (IOW 251).
Time-Course	The description of time factors in the creative process. Divided into three aspects: Frequency; Speed; Duration.