What does it mean to describe a work of art as being ‘original’? Frank Sibley believed that works of art are not valued for their originality independently of their aesthetic value. He argued that a work may be described as being ‘original’ if it is innovative and also exhibits some further aesthetic value. In this essay, I argue against this conjunctive account of originality as some kind of i...

In their groundbreaking essay ”Emotional Intelligence” (1990), Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer define their new concept “as the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.” (Salovey and Mayer 1990, italics in the original). The theory of...

Much of the work presented in this thesis has been previously published as listed below. Although some of these papers have co-authors, the work appearing in this thesis is entirely my own, with the exception of parts of chapter 3, which presents work jointly carried out by myself and Adrian Thompson. The respective contributions to this work will be explicitly stated at the beginning of the ch...

1. Overview Output-output correspondence (OOC) constraints, constraints which demand correspondence between independently occurring surface forms, have recently been added to the set of constraint types invoked in much OT work. In this paper we examine some of the better-known arguments originally adduced in support of OOC constraints, and argue that adoption of such a powerful mechanism is not...

The paper deals with combinatorial and stochastic structures of cubical token systems. A cubical token system is an instance of a token system, which in turn is an instance of a transition system. It is shown that some basic results of combinatorial and stochastic parts of media theory hold almost in identical form for cubical token systems, although some underlying concepts are quite different...

This paper examines the relationship between knowing how to G and the ability to G, which is typically presented in one of the following ways: (a) knowing how to G entails the ability to G; (b) knowing how to G does not entail the ability to G. In an attempt to reconcile these two putatively opposing positions, I distinguish between type and token actions. It is my contention that S can know ho...

Originality, a key aspect of creativity, is difficult to measure. We tested the relationship between originality and similarity in two semantic spaces: latent semantic analysis (LSA) and pointwise mutual information (PMI). Similarity in both spaces was negatively correlated with human judgments of originality of responses on a test of divergent thinking. PMI was correlated more strongly both wi...

Through the analysis of collaborations in an online virtual community, the impact of originality on popularity and practicality is tested. These tests in turn are based on a method for measuring the distance between 3D shapes. In sum, this paper presents a new method for gauging innovation, and suggests ways of further understanding the role technology plays in encouraging creativity. From an o...