Bacon's Promise

Widely adopted personality tests and tests for creativity have become one of the most familiar examples of scientific positivism in the study of human psychology. By their nature, however, they cannot succeed at what they claim to do. A science of ‘creativity’ that excludes artistic and literary expression has much to do with a commercial society’s efforts to co-opt the full range of human experience, and very little to do with the qualities that make that experience the extraordinary and irreducible phenomenon that it is.