Again from How Traditions Live and Die by Olivier Morin:
To say that transmission is involved is not to say that blind copying is at work, nor to deny that diffusion involves a dose of independent reconstruction by every learner. Transmission and reinvention need not exclude each other . . .
Kroeber spoke of stimulus diffusion for inventions that were adopted on such a slim basis that its adopters had to reinvent them almost from scratch. The history of technology provides the most telling examples, with the development of ersatz products and the emulation of inaccessible or secret techniques. When the late-eighteenth-century French economy (blockaded as a consequence of war) sought to produce its own graphite-tipped pencils, they knew how to make them, but, for lack of available graphite, they had to make do with an entirely different process. When Europeans sought to emulate porcelain, it took them some time to find kaolin; when they did, they lacked the information to use it, and had to reinvent the whole thing. Graphite pencils and porcelain were models that offered only a meager input to their imitators. The product only told the imitators that a given problem could be solved, leaving them with the task of reinventing the solution.
Morin describes the Chinese porcelain model as "meager input" into European thinking at the time. Yet, in doing so, he cites Kroeber's 1940 article in American Anthropologist, Stimulus Diffusion, which speculates that the existence of such a model was much more than a meager input:
The type of diffusion which I am now about to examine . . . occurs in situations where a system or pattern as such encounters no resistance to its spread, but there are difficulties in regard to the transmission of the concrete content of the system. In this case it is the idea of the complex or system which is accepted, but it remains for the receiving culture to develop a new content. This somewhat special process might therefore be called "idea-diffusion" or "stimulus-diffusion."
One of these instances concerns the invention of porcelain in Europe in the early eighteenth century. Chinese porcelain had been coming to Europe for nearly two hundred years and naturally excited admiration. A definite goal was accordingly set: to produce porcelain without the heavy expense of import from China. The problem was to find the necessary materials at home and to develop the required technical skills. After a considerable period of conscious experimentation the necessary kaolin deposits were discovered, first in Germany and then elsewhere in Europe, and the specific technologies needed were developed.1 The consequence is that we have here what from one angle is nothing else than an invention. Superficially it is a "parallel," in the technical language of ethnology. However, it is equally significant that the invention, although original so far as Europeans were concerned, was not really independent. A goal or objective was set by something previously existing in another culture; the originality was limited to achieving the mechanisms by which this goal could be attained. If it were not for the preexistence of Chinese porcelain, and the fact of its having reached Europe, there is no reason to believe that Europeans would have invented porcelain in the eighteenth century, and perhaps not until much later, if at all.
Much of this relates—perhaps in a strange way—to what I had been thinking about over here. Even if we imagine that the Europeans had only heard about the material and its attractive uses and did not have examples of Chinese porcelain in front of them to try to copy, it is difficult to understate, pace Morin, the difference between knowing that something is supposed to make sense (or that a problem is supposed to be solvable) and not knowing this.
[Author footnote]: First by Biittger and Tschirnhaus in Dresden, 1708–09.