Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The psychological theory that association is the basic principle of all mental activity.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The psychological theory which regards the laws of association as the fundamental laws of mental action and development. See
association of ideas , under association. - noun Same as
Fourierism . - noun Also
associationalism .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Philos.) The doctrine or theory held by associationists.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun psychology A theory that
association (of experiences etc) is the basis of consciousness and mental activity
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun (psychology) a theory that association is the basic principle of mental activity
Etymologies
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Examples
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* In my paper (2001) I consider "associationism" withing the context of two principle dimensions of thought, that being associative learning (conditioning) and habituation.
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Like the effects of Mesmerism, gravity, and a host of other phenomena through which post-Enlightenment culture was beginning to encounter its own uncanny nature, the point of post-Baconian scientific observation or post-Lockean associationism, of turning the world over to man's ability to witness it and his place in it, was that the empirical evidence from which we construct our bodies of knowledge was, in fact, merely symptomatic of the world's latency.
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These last two features in particular make Humean associationism a highly economical and simple theory.
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However, for present purposes his arguments are interesting chiefly not so much for their elaboration of associationism, but for the light they throw on the development of Scottish philosophy in the nineteenth century.
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An uncontroversial role of §17 is to provide a characterization of an object, or more to the point, of a representation of an object, that facilitates a challenge to Humean associationism.
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PDP takes an approach to learning which is response oriented rather than rule-governed and this is because, like behaviorism, it has roots in associationism standford uni behaviourist page
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PDP takes an approach to learning which is response oriented rather than rule-governed and this is because, like behaviorism, it has roots in associationism standford uni behaviourist page
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Materialism (as evinced in Lockean associationism) "removes all reality and immediateness of perception, and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres, the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motions in our own brain"
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But details aside, the associationism, in its simplest form, clearly amounts to classical conditioning, and if you consider Mill's account of the role of pleasure then there is a strong element of re-inforcement theory.
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This became a standard presentation of associationism until Mill's father published his
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