Our story of revolutionary science is one of independence, creativity and free-thinking radicals. Thomas Kuhn saw things differently. He thought that dogmatic commitment to established norms is the unexpected engines of science’s success, writes Vasso Kindi.

Creativity is of great significance, especially in the arts and sciences where originality and novelty are highly valued. Because of its significance, many scholars have tried to explain how it is made possible. Educators and psychologists, in particular, have investigated the correlations between creativity and personality traits, giving emphasis to independence, imagination, flexibility, and open-mindedness.

In 1950, the psychologist J. P. Guilford thought that mass education, which stresses conformity, discourages the development of creative personality (Guilford 1950, 448). Sixty years later, the same thought was expressed by the educator Sir Ken Robinson in his 2010 TEDx talk entitled “Changing education paradigms”. He there argued that we have to go “in the exact opposite direction” of an education that has been modeled in the image of industrialism which favors conformity and standardization. In Ken Robinson’s view, we should adopt a new paradigm that encourages divergent thinking, i.e., thinking of new possibilities and unconventional and innovative ideas, which is “an essential capacity for creativity”.

In 1959, Thomas Kuhn, who at the time was just a physicist who had turned historian of science (his ground-breaking philosophical book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was yet to be published), was invited to give a talk at a University of Utah Conference on the identification of scientific talent. There, psychologists stressed again the significance of divergent thinking for creativity, of the freedom to entertain possibilities and of the capacity to go off in different directions. Kuhn began his talk by asking his audience to entertain his divergent idea, namely that creativity in science depends not only on divergent but, equally, on convergent thinking.