After doing away with the evolutionary scaffold for BVSR, what remains is anotion of "blindness" that does not distinguish BVSR from other theories ofcreativity, and an assumption that creativity can be understood by treatingideas as discrete, countable entities, as opposed to different externalmanifestations of a singular gradually solidifying internal conception.Uprooted from Darwinian theory, BVSR lacks a scientific framework that can becalled upon to generate hypotheses and test them. In lieu of such a framework,hypotheses appear to be generated on the basis of previous data--they are nottheory-driven. The paper does not explain how the hypothesis that creativity isenhanced by engagement in a "network of enterprises" is derived from BVSR; thishypothesis is more compatible with competing conceptions of creativity. Thenotion that creativity involves backtracking conflates evidence forbacktracking with respect to the external output with evidence for backtrackingof the conception of the invention. The first does not imply the second; acreator can set aside a creative output but cannot go back to the conception ofthe task he/she had prior to generating that output. The notion that creativityentails superfluity (i.e., many ideas have "zero usefulness") is misguided;usefulness is context-dependent, moreover, the usefulness of an idea may residein its being a critical stepping-stone to a subsequent idea.
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