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Associationist Theories of Thought

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2015)

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  1. Stop me if you've heard this one before: The Chomskyan hammer and the Skinnerian nail.Alex Madva - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:52-54.
    This piece is a comment on Quilty-Dunn, Jake, Nicolas Porot, and Eric Mandelbaum. 2023. “The Best Game in Town: The Reemergence of the Language-of-Thought Hypothesis across the Cognitive Sciences.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46: e261. -/- The target article signal boosts important ongoing work across the cognitive sciences. However, its theoretical claims, generative value, and purported contributions are – where not simply restatements of arguments extensively explored elsewhere – imprecise, noncommittal, and underdeveloped to a degree that makes them difficult to (...)
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  • (1 other version)The best game in town: The reemergence of the language-of-thought hypothesis across the cognitive sciences.Jake Quilty-Dunn, Nicolas Porot & Eric Mandelbaum - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e261.
    Mental representations remain the central posits of psychology after many decades of scrutiny. However, there is no consensus about the representational format(s) of biological cognition. This paper provides a survey of evidence from computational cognitive psychology, perceptual psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and social psychology, and concludes that one type of format that routinely crops up is the language-of-thought (LoT). We outline six core properties of LoTs: (i) discrete constituents; (ii) role-filler independence; (iii) predicate–argument structure; (iv) logical operators; (v) inferential (...)
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  • Perceptual learning and reasons‐responsiveness.Zoe Jenkin - 2022 - Noûs 57 (2):481-508.
    Perceptual experiences are not immediately responsive to reasons. You see a stick submerged in a glass of water as bent no matter how much you know about light refraction. Due to this isolation from reasons, perception is traditionally considered outside the scope of epistemic evaluability as justified or unjustified. Is perception really as independent from reasons as visual illusions make it out to be? I argue no, drawing on psychological evidence from perceptual learning. The flexibility of perceptual learning is a (...)
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  • The case for moral empiricism.Shaun Nichols - 2021 - Analysis 81 (3):549-567.
    It is an old and venerable idea in philosophy that morality is built into us, and this nativist view has seen a resurgence of late. Indeed, the prevailing systematic account of how we acquire complex moral representations is a nativist view inspired by arguments in Chomskyan linguistics. In this article, I review the leading argument for moral nativism – the poverty of the moral stimulus. I defend a systematic empiricist alternative that draws on the resources of statistical learning. Such an (...)
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  • The Fragmentation of Belief.Joseph Bendana & Eric Mandelbaum - 2021 - In Cristina Borgoni, Dirk Kindermann & Andrea Onofri (eds.), The Fragmented Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Belief storage is often modeled as having the structure of a single, unified web. This model of belief storage is attractive and widely assumed because it appears to provide an explanation of the flexibility of cognition and the complicated dynamics of belief revision. However, when one scrutinizes human cognition, one finds strong evidence against a unified web of belief and for a fragmented model of belief storage. Using the best available evidence from cognitive science, we develop this fragmented model into (...)
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  • Creativity.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2020 - In Explaining Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 262-296.
    Comparatively easy questions we might ask about creativity are distinguished from the hard question of explaining transformative creativity. Many have focused on the easy questions, offering no reason to think that the imagining relied upon in creative cognition cannot be reduced to more basic folk psychological states. The relevance of associative thought processes to songwriting is then explored as a means for understanding the nature of transformative creativity. Productive artificial neural networks—known as generative antagonistic networks (GANs)—are a recent example of (...)
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  • Explaining Imagination.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2020 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    ​Imagination will remain a mystery—we will not be able to explain imagination—until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process—one with (...)
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  • (1 other version)The science of belief: A progress report.Nicolas Porot & Eric Mandelbaum - forthcoming - WIREs Cognitive Science 1.
    The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of belief fixation: one that is automatic (...)
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  • Inference Belief and Interpretation in Science.Avijit Lahiri - manuscript
    This monograph is an in-depth and engaging discourse on the deeply cognitive roots of human scientific quest. The process of making scientific inferences is continuous with the day-to-day inferential activity of individuals, and is predominantly inductive in nature. Inductive inference, which is fallible, exploratory, and open-ended, is of essential relevance in our incessant efforts at making sense of a complex and uncertain world around us, and covers a vast range of cognitive activities, among which scientific exploration constitutes the pinnacle. Inductive (...)
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  • Construct validity in psychological tests – the case of implicit social cognition.Uljana Feest - 2020 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 10 (1):1-24.
    This paper looks at the question of what it means for a psychological test to have construct validity. I approach this topic by way of an analysis of recent debates about the measurement of implicit social cognition. After showing that there is little theoretical agreement about implicit social cognition, and that the predictive validity of implicit tests appears to be low, I turn to a debate about their construct validity. I show that there are two questions at stake: First, what (...)
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  • Assimilation and control: belief at the lowest levels.Eric Mandelbaum - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (2):441-447.
    The core of Zimmerman’s picture posits an inverse correlation between an action’s automaticity and belief’s role in the action’s execution. This proposal faces serious problems. First, high-attention, high-control actions don’t seem to heighten awareness of one’s beliefs. Second, low-attention, low-control actions are caused by the same states at play when executing high-attention, high-control actions, in which case there is no ontological difference in the states involved in these behaviors. Third, on Zimmerman’s view it is unclear what it is for a (...)
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  • Bias and Perception.Susanna Siegel - 2020 - In Erin Beeghly & Alex Madva (eds.), An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind. New York, NY, USA: Routledge. pp. 99-115.
    chapter on perception and bias including implicit bias.
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  • Troubles with Bayesianism: An introduction to the psychological immune system.Eric Mandelbaum - 2018 - Mind and Language 34 (2):141-157.
    A Bayesian mind is, at its core, a rational mind. Bayesianism is thus well-suited to predict and explain mental processes that best exemplify our ability to be rational. However, evidence from belief acquisition and change appears to show that we do not acquire and update information in a Bayesian way. Instead, the principles of belief acquisition and updating seem grounded in maintaining a psychological immune system rather than in approximating a Bayesian processor.
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  • There are no i-beliefs or i-desires at work in fiction consumption and this is why.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2020 - In Explaining Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 210-233.
    Currie’s (2010) argument that “i-desires” must be posited to explain our responses to fiction is critically discussed. It is argued that beliefs and desires featuring ‘in the fiction’ operators—and not sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" or "i-desires")—are the crucial states involved in generating fiction-directed affect. A defense of the “Operator Claim” is mounted, according to which ‘in the fiction’ operators would be also be required within fiction-directed sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" and "i-desires"), were there such. Once we appreciate that (...)
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  • What we can (and can’t) infer about implicit bias from debiasing experiments.Nick Byrd - 2019 - Synthese (2):1-29.
    The received view of implicit bias holds that it is associative and unreflective. Recently, the received view has been challenged. Some argue that implicit bias is not predicated on “any” associative process, but it is unreflective. These arguments rely, in part, on debiasing experiments. They proceed as follows. If implicit bias is associative and unreflective, then certain experimental manipulations cannot change implicitly biased behavior. However, these manipulations can change such behavior. So, implicit bias is not associative and unreflective. This paper (...)
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  • Rethinking associations in psychology.Mike Dacey - 2016 - Synthese 193 (12):3763-3786.
    I challenge the dominant understanding of what it means to say two thoughts are associated. The two views that dominate the current literature treat association as a kind of mechanism that drives sequences of thought. The first, which I call reductive associationism, treats association as a kind of neural mechanism. The second treats association as a feature of the kind of psychological mechanism associative processing. Both of these views are inadequate. I argue that association should instead be seen as a (...)
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  • Experience without Memory: Optogenetics, the Self, and the Ethics of Forgetting.David Kendall Casey - unknown
    The horizon of clinical memory modification, long the domain of science fiction, is rapidly approaching; it is therefore imperative that we understand the ethical implications of such neuromodificatory technologies. We might begin such inquiry with the public’s worries about these technologies, namely that modifying memory will concomitantly modify the self. Yet, before discerning the reasonableness of this worry, we must understand the meaning of “the self” in relation to memory. Distilling this conception of the self is the principal aim of (...)
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  • The unity of higher cognition: the case against dual process theory.David Sorensen - unknown
    Dual process theorists posit the existence of two distinct types of cognitive processing in order to explain domains of higher cognition such as reasoning and decision-making. Such theories typically allude to co-varying clusters of properties as well as an underlying mechanism or system for each processing type. I will argue that a host of empirical findings cast doubt upon the validity of both theses, and that simpler models of higher cognition—that do not appeal to types of processing—might be preferable.
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  • Association and the Mechanisms of Priming.Mike Dacey - 2019 - Journal of Cognitive Science 20 (3):281-321.
    In psychology, increasing interest in priming has brought with it a revival of associationist views. Association seems a natural explanation for priming: simple associative links carry subcritical levels of activation from representations of the prime stimulus to representations of the target stimulus. This then facilitates use of the representation of the target. I argue that the processes responsible for priming are not associative. They are more complex. Even so, associative models do get something right about how these processes behave. As (...)
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