Associationism is a theory that connects learning to thought based on principles of the organism’s causal history. It claims that pairs of thoughts become associated based on the organism’s past experience. The frequency with which an organism has come into contact with Xs and Ys in one’s environment determines the frequency with which thoughts about Xs and thoughts about Ys will arise together in the organism’s (Hume et al). In particular, associationism can be used as A theory of learning (e.g., as in behaviorist theorizing), A theory of thinking (as in Jamesian “streams of thought”), A theory of mental structures (e.g., as concept pairs), and A theory of the implementation of thought (e.g., connectionism). All these theories are separable, but share a related, empiricist-friendly core. A “pure associationist” will refer to one who holds associationist theories of learning, thinking, mental structure, and implementation.

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Decoding Word Association 6
Associationist Theory of Thought
Ref-Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Mar 17 2015

2. What is Associationism?
 Associationism is a theory that connects learning to thought based on
principles of the organism’s causal history.
 It claims that pairs of thoughts become associated based on the
organism’s past experience.
 The frequency with which an organism has come into contact with Xs
and Ys in one’s environment determines the frequency with which
thoughts about Xs and thoughts about Ys will arise together in the
organism’s (Hume et al).
 In particular, associationism can be used as
 A theory of learning (e.g., as in behaviorist theorizing),
 A theory of thinking (as in Jamesian “streams of thought”),
 A theory of mental structures (e.g., as concept pairs), and
 A theory of the implementation of thought (e.g., connectionism).
 All these theories are separable, but share a related, empiricist-friendly core.
 A “pure associationist” will refer to one who holds associationist theories
of learning, thinking, mental structure, and implementation.

3. What is Associationism?
 Associationism movement has also been closely aligned with a number of
different doctrines over the years:
 Empiricism,
 Behaviorism,
 Anti-representationalism (i.e., skepticism about the necessity of
representational realism in psychological explanation),
 Gradual learning, and
 Domain-general learning.

4. Associationism as a Theory of Mental Processes: The
Empiricist Connection
 Empiricism tends to offer a theory of learning to explain as much of our
mental life as possible for the acquisition of concepts (for the empiricists’
“Ideas”, for the behaviorists “responses”) through learning.
 However, the mental processes that underwrite such learning are almost
never themselves posited (put forward as fact or as a basis for argument.) to
be learned.
 For the amount of mental processes positing that there is only one mental
process: the ability to associate ideas.
 The ability to associate, that process must be flexible enough to
accomplish a wide range of cognitive work in particular at least
learning and thinking.

5. 3. Associationism as a Theory of Learning
 In one of its senses, “associationism” refers to a theory of how organisms
acquire concepts, associative structures, response biases, and even
propositional knowledge.
 Hume’s associationism was, first and foremost, a theory connecting how
perceptions (“Impressions”) determined trains of thought (successions
of “Ideas”).
 Hume’s empiricism demanded that there were no Ideas in the mind that
were not first given in experience.
 For Hume, the principles of association constrained the functional role of
Ideas once they were copied from Impressions:
 if Impressions IM1 and IM2 were associated in perception, then their
corresponding Ideas, ID1 and ID2 would also become associated.
 In other words, the ordering of Ideas was determined by the
ordering of the Impressions that caused the Ideas to arise.
 Hume’s analysis consisted of three types of associative relations:
 Cause and effect,
 Contiguity, and
 Resemblance.

6. 3. Associationism as a Theory of Learning…..
 If two Impressions instantiated one of these associative relations, then
their corresponding Ideas would mimic the same instantiation.
 For instance, if Impression IM1 was cotemporaneous with Impressions
IM2, then (ceteris paribus- other things being equal.) their corresponding
Ideas, ID1 and ID2, would become associated.
 Hume’s associationism was mostly a way of determining the functional
profile of Ideas.—associative learning—
 If two contents of experiences, X and Y, instantiate some associative
relation, R, then those contents will become associated, so that
future activations of X will tend to bring about activations of Y.
 The Humean form of associative learning (where R is equated with
cause and effect, contiguity, or resemblance) has been hugely
influential,
 Pavlov introduced the concept of classical conditioning as a modernized
version of associative learning.
 The general method of learning was to pair an unconditioned stimulus
(US) with a novel stimulus.
 An unconditioned stimulus is just a stimulus that instinctively, without

7. 3. Associationism as a Theory of Learning…..
 Pavlov introduced the …….. response in an organism.
 Since this response is not itself learned, the response is referred to as an
“unconditioned response” (UR).
 Over time, the contiguity between the US and the neutral stimulus
causes the neutral stimulus to provoke the same response as the US.
 Once the bell starts to provoke salivation, the bell has become a “conditioned
stimulus” (CS) and the salivating, when prompted by the bell alone, a
“conditioned response” (CR). The associative learning here is learning to
form new stimulus-response pairs between the bell and the salivation.
 Classical conditioning is a “stimulus substitution” paradigm where one
stimulus can be swapped for another to provoke a response.
 However, the responses that are provoked remain unchanged; all
that changes is the stimulus that gets associated with the response.
 Edward Thorndike’s research with cats was a new view of learning, operant
conditioning (for the organism is “operating” on its environment) was not
merely the passive learning of Pavlov, but a species-nonspecific, general,
active theory of learning.

8. 3. Associationism as a Theory of Learning…..3
 Thorndike’s famous “Law of Effect” (1911), the first canonical psychological
law of associationist learning.
 It asserted that responses that are accompanied by the organism
feeling satisfied will be more likely to be associated with the situation
in which the behavior was executed, whereas responses that are
accompanied with a feeling of discomfort to the animal will, ceteris
paribus, make the response less likely to occur when the organism
encounters the same situation.
 The greater the positive or negative feelings produced, the greater the
likelihood that the behavior will be evinced.
 To this Thorndike added the “Law of Exercise”,
 Responses to situations will, ceteris paribus, be more connected to
those situations in proportion to the frequency of past pairings
between situation and response.
 B.F. Skinner stressed the notion not just of consequences but of
reinforcement as the basis of forming associations. For Skinner,
 A behavior would get associated with a situation according to the
frequency and strength of reinforcement that would arise as a

9. 3. Associationism as a Theory of Learning…..4
 Associative learning is supposed to mirror the
contingencies in the world without adding additional
structure to them.
 Domain generality: excising domain-specific learning
mechanisms constrains the amount of innate mental
processes one has to posit.
 Thus both Hume and Pavlov assumed that associative
learning could be used to acquire associations between
any contents, regardless of the types of contents they were.
For example, Pavlov writes,
 Any natural phenomenon chosen at will may be converted into
a conditioned stimulus.
 For Pavlov the content of the CS doesn’t matter.
 Any content will do, as long as it bears the right functional
relationship in the organism’s learning history.

10. Associationism as a Theory of Mental Structure
 Associative learning raise the question: when one learns to associate
contents X and Y e.g., previous experiences with Xs and Ys
instantiated R, how does one store the information that X and Y are
associated?
 An associative structure describes the type of bond that connects two distinct
mental states.
 An example of such a structure is the associative pair salt/pepper.
 The associative structure is defined functionally:
 If X and Y form an associative structure, then, ceteris
paribus("other things equal“), activations of mental state X bring
about mental state Y and vice versa without the mediation of any
other psychological states (such as an explicitly represented rule
telling the system to activate a concept because its associate has been
activated).
 In other words, saying that two concepts are associated amounts to
saying that there is a reliable, psychologically basic causal relation
that holds between them—the activation of one of the concepts
causes the activation of the other.

11. Associationism as a Theory of Mental Structure….2
 Propositional structures. strings of mental representations that express
a proposition—because propositionally structured mental representations
have structure over and above the mere associative bond between two
concepts.
 There are other representational formats that the mind might harbor (e.g.,
analog magnitudes or iconic structures).
 For instance, not all semantically related concepts are harboured in
associative structures.
 Semantically related concepts may in fact also be directly
associated (as in doctor/nurse) or
 They may not (as in horse/zebra; see Perea and Rosa 2002).
 The difference in structure is not just a theoretical possibility: these
different structures have different functional profiles.
 For example conditioned associations appear to last longer than
semantic associations do in subjects with dementia (Glosser and
Friedman 1991).

12. 4.1 Associative Symmetry
 The analysis of associative structures implies that associations are
symmetric in their causal effects:
 If a thinker has a bond between salt/pepper, then salt should bring about
pepper just as well as pepper brings about salt.
 But all is rarely equal.
 Thorndike, Hull, and Skinner knew that the order of learning affected the
causal sequence of recall:
 If one is always hearing “salt and pepper” then salt will be more
poised to activate pepper than pepper to activate salt.
 So, included in the ceteris paribus clause in the analysis of
associative structures is the idealization that the learning of the
associative elements was equally well randomized in order.
 Similarly, associative symmetry is violated when there are differing amounts
of associative connections between the individual associated elements.
 For example, in the green/tree.
 Green can be associated with many and not only Tree

13. 4.2 Activation Maps of Associative Structure
 An associative activation map (sometimes called a “spreading activation”
map, Collins and Luftus 1975) is a mapping for a single thinker of all the
associative connections between concepts.
 There are many ways of operationalizing associative connections.
 In the abstract, a psychologist will attempt to probe which concepts (or
other mental elements) activate which other concepts (or elements).
 Imagine a subject who is asked to say whether a string of letters
constitutes a word or not, which is the typical goal given to subjects in a
“lexical decision task”.
 If a subject has just seen the word “bugs”, we assume that the concept
bugs was activated and response is “insects” then Insect was primed
 one can generate an associative mapping of a thinker’s mind and would
constitute a mapping of the associative structures one harbours.

14. 4.3 Relation Between Associative Learning and Associative
Structures
 The British Empiricists desired - pure associationist theory
 The behaviorists also tended- a pure associationist theory
 Pure associationists tend to be partial to a connection that
Fodor (2003) refers to as “Bare-Boned Association”.( The
idea is that the current strength of an association connection
between X and Y is determined by the frequency of the past
associations of X and Y. )
 In other words, the learning history of past associations
determines the current functional profile of the
corresponding associative structures.
 Associative learning eventuates in associative structure .
 We may gain propositional structures from associative
learning .
 This may happen in two ways.
 In the first, one may gain an associative structure that has a

15. 4.4 Extinction and Counterconditioning
 There is a different, tighter relationship between associative
learning and associative structures concerning how to modulate
an association.
 Associative theorists have been clear on the functional
characteristics necessary to modulate an already created
association.
 There have been two generally agreed upon routes:
 Extinction - During extinction one decouples the external
presentation of the CS and the US by presenting the CS
without the US (and sometimes the US without the CS). Over
time, the organism will learn to disconnect the CS and US.
 Counterconditioning. -Counterconditioning can only occur
when an organism has an association between a mental
representation and a valence. Counterconditioning counters
the existing valence with the opposite valence. Over multiple

16. 5. Associative Transitions-discusses Thinking
 The pure associationist will want a theory that covers not just acquisition and
cognitive structure, but also the transition between thoughts.
 Associative transitions are a particular type of thinking, akin to what
William James called “The Stream of Thought” (James 1890).
 Associative transitions are movements between thoughts that are not
predicated on a prior logical relationship between the elements of the
thoughts that one connects.
 Associative transitions are transitions in thought that are not based on the
logico-syntactic properties of thoughts.
 Rather, they are transitions in thought that occur based on the associative
relations among the separate thoughts.
 According to this taxonomy, talk of an “associative inference” (e.g., Anderson
et al. 1994, Armstrong et al. 2012) is a borderline oxymoron.
 The easiest way to give sense to the idea of an associative inference is
for it to involve transitions in thought that began because they were
purely inferential (as understood by the computational theory of mind) but
then became associated over time.

17. 5. Associative Transitions….2
 That is, the constant contiguity between the premises and
the conclusion occurred because the inference was made
so frequently, but the inference was originally made so
frequently not because of the associative relations between
the premises and conclusion, but because the form of the
thoughts (and the particular motivations of the thinker).
This constant contiguity then formed the basis for an
associative linkage between the premises and the
conclusion.
 Associative transitions tend to move across different
content domains, whereas inferential transitions tend to
stay on a more focused set of contents. These differences
have been seen to result in measurable differences in
mood: associative thinking across topics bolsters mood
when compared to logical thinking on a single topic (Mason
and Bar 2012).

18. 6. Associative Instantiation
 The associationist position so far has been neutral on how
associations are to be implemented.
 Implementation can be seen at a representational (that is
psychological) level of explanation, or at the neural level.
 A pure associationist picture would posit an associative
implementation base at one, or both, of these levels.
 The most well-known associative instantiation base is a class of
networks called Connectionist networks.
 Connectionist networks are sometimes pitched at the
psychological level.
 This amounts to the claim that models of algorithms
embedded in the networks capture the essence of certain
mental processes, such as associative learning.

19. 6. Associative Instantiation
 Other times connectionist networks are said to be models of neural activity
(“neural networks”).
 Connectionist networks consist in sets of nodes, generally
 Input nodes-Input nodes are taken to be analogs of sensory neurons
(or sub-symbolic sensory representation
 Hidden nodes-Hidden nodes are stand-ins for all other neurons
 Output nodes-Output nodes the analog of motor neurons (or sub-
symbolic behavioral representations)
 The network consists in these nodes being connected to each
other with varying strengths.
 The topology of the connections gives one an associative
mapping of the system, with the associative weights understood as
the differing strengths of connections.
 On the psychological reading they are generally understood to be
representing synaptic conductance (and are the analogs of
dendrites).
 These networks are purely associative and do not contain
propositional elements, and the nodes themselves are not to be

20. 7. Relation between the Varieties of Association and Related
Positions
 Four types of associationism share a certain
empiricist spiritual similarity, but are logically, and
empirically, separable.
 domain-general mental processes will theorize that
the mind consists of associative structures acquired
by associative learning which enter into associative
transitions and are implemented in an associative
instantiation base.
 Jerry Fodor maintains that intramodular lexicons
contain associative structures (Fodor 1983)
 anti-representationalist non-associationist ‘s stand can
be interpreted as, for some areas of learning, a
proponent of gradual learning without being
associationist
 Pro step-wise, one shot learning
 Some qualify as holding a domain-general learning
position without it being associationist.

21. 8. Associationism in Social Psychology
 Since the cognitive revolution, associationism’s influence
has died out quite a bit in cognitive psychology and
psycholinguistics and has taken much smaller roles
(for example, it has often been suggested that
mental lexicons are structured, in part, associatively,
which is why lexical decision tasks are taken to be
facilitation maps of one’s lexicon).
 Associationism is also still thriving in the connectionist
literature, as well as in the animal cognition tradition.
 The ascendance of associationism in social psychology
has been a fairly recent development, and has caused a
revival of associationist theories in philosophy and
cognitive science.
 The two areas of social psychology that have seen the
greatest renaissance of associationism are the implicit
attitude and dual-process theory literature.

22. 8.1 Implicit Attitudes
 Implicit attitudes are generally operationally
defined as mental representations that are
unreported, inaccessible to
consciousness, and detectable in
paradigms such as the Implicit Association
Test and others
 The default position among social
psychologists is to treat implicit attitudes as
if they are associations among mental
representations (Fazio 2007), or among
pairs of mental representations and
valences.
 In particular, they treat implicit attitudes as
associative structures which enter into
associative transitions. Recently this issue

23. 8.2 Dual Process Theories
 Associative structures and transitions are widely implicated in a particular
type of influential dual-process theory. It originates from work in the
psychology of reasoning and is often also invoked in the heuristics and
biases tradition (see, e.g., Kahneman 2011).
 The dual-process strain most relevant to the current discussion posits two
systems,
 one evolutionarily ancient intuitive system underlying
unconscious, automatic, fast, parallel and associative processing,
-System 1
 Is often understood to include a collection of autonomous, distinct
subsystems, each of which is recruited to deal with distinct types of problems
 the other an evolutionarily recent reflective system characterized by
conscious, controlled, slow, “rule-governed” serial processes-
System 2
 Although theories differ on how System 1 interacts with System 2, the
theoretical core of System 1 is arguing that its processing is
essentially associative. As in the implicit attitude debate, dual
systems models have recently come under fire though they remain very
popular.

24. 9. Criticisms of Associationism
 9.1 Learning Curves
 The basic associative learning theories imply, either explicitly or implicitly,
slow, gradual learning of associations (Baeyens et al. 1995).
 The learning process can be summarized in a learning curve which plots
the frequency (or magnitude) of the conditioned response as a function
of the number of reinforcements .Mappings between CRs and USs are
gradually built up over numerous trials or experiences (in the world).
 Gradual, slow learning has come under fire from a variety of areas
 In a series of works re-analyzing animal behavior, Gallistel has argued
that although group-level learning curves do display the properties
of being negatively accelerated and gradually developing, these
curves are misleading because no individual’s learning curve has
these properties.
 Gallistel has argued that learning for individuals is generally step-
like, rapid, and abrupt.
 An individual’s learning from a low-level of responding to asymptotic
responding is very quick even literally one-shot learning.
 For example, after analyzing multiple experiments of animal learning of
spatial location Gallistel writes
 “the learning of a spatial location generally requires but a single
experience. Several trials may, however, be required to convince the
subject that the location is predictable from trial to trial.” (Gallistel et
al. 2004: 13130)

25. 9. Criticisms of Associationism
 9.2 The Problem of Predication
 The problem of predication is, at its core, a problem of how an
associative mechanism can result in the acquisition of
subject/predicate structures, structures which many theorists believe
appear in language, thought, and judgment.
 9.3 Word Learning
 Multiple issues in the acquisition of the lexicon appear to cause problems
for associationism. Some of the most well known examples are reviewed
below.
 9.3.1 Fast Mapping
 Children learn words at an incredible rate, acquiring around 6,000
words by age 6 (Carey 2010: 184). If gradual learning is the rule, then
words too should be learned gradually across this time.
 Carey discovered the phenomenon of “fast mapping”, which is one-shot
learning of a word (Carey 1978a,b; Carey and Bartlett 1978).
 Fast mapping poses two problems for associationism.
 The first is that the learning of a new word did not develop slowly, as
would be predicted by proponents of gradual learning.
 The second is that in order for the word learning to proceed, the mind
must have been aided by additional principles not given by the
environment.
 Studies imply that the mind does add structure to what is learned.

26. 9. Criticisms of Associationism
 9.3.2 Syntactic Category Learning
 “Motherese”, the name of the type of language that infants generally hear,
consists of simple sentences .The infant’s vocabulary massively over-
represents nouns in the first 100 words or so, while massively under-
representing the verbs .
 Moreover, children hear a preponderance of determiners (“the” and “a”) but
don’t produce them (Bloom 2000). The disparity between the variation of
the syntactic categories infants receive as input and produce as output is
troublesome to associationism.
 9.4 Against the Contiguity Analysis of Associationism
 Contiguity has been a central part of associationist analyses since the
British Empiricists. In the experimental literature, the problem of figuring out
the parameters needed for contiguity has sometimes been termed the
problem of the “Window of Association” (e.g., Gallistel and King 2009).
 If contiguity is to be a founding pillar of associationism, then the window
needs to be relatively short.
 If the domain generality of associative learning is desired, then the
window needs to be homogenous across content domains.

27. 9. Criticisms of Associationism
 9.4.1 Against the Necessity of Contiguity
 Research on “taste aversions” and “bait-shyness” provided a variety of
problems with contiguity in the associative learning tradition of classical
conditioning.
 Gustatory stimulus (e.g., drinking water or eating a hot dog) but not an
audiovisual stimulus (a light and a sound) would naturally become
associated with feeling nauseated.
 The temporal delay shows that the CS (the flavored water) needn’t be
contiguous with the US (the feeling of nausea) in order for learning to
occur, thus showing that contiguity isn’t necessary for associative
learning.
 Learning does not seem to be entirely domain general (for similar content
specificity effects in humans, see Baeyens et al. 1990).
 Lastly, “The Garcia effect” has also been used to show problems in the
learning curve.“Taste aversions” are the phenomena whereby an organism
gets sick from ingesting the stimulus and the taste or odor of that stimulus
gets associated with the feeling of sickness.
 9.4.2. Against the Sufficiency of Contiguity
 Kamin’s famous blocking experiments (1969) showed that not all
contiguous structures lead to classical conditioning..

28. 9. Criticisms of Associationism
 9.5 Coextensionality
 The question of why some property is singled out as a CS
as opposed to different, equally contemporaneously
instantiated properties.
 The problem of saying which properties become
associated when multiple properties are coinstantiated
sometimes goes by the name the “Credit Assignment
Problem” .
 Sometimes the lack of a property being instantiated is an
integral component of what is learned. To deal with the
problem of missing properties, contemporary
associationists have introduced an important element to
the theory: inhibition.
 Inhibition, using associations as modulators and not just
activators, is a central part of current associationist
thinking. For example, in connectionist networks,
inhibition is implemented by the activation of certain
nodes inhibiting the activation of other nodes. Connection