Abstract
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 (often implicitly treating them so). 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 highly abstract filler term, standing in for causal relations between representational states in a system. Associations, so viewed, could be implemented by many different mechanisms. I outline the role that this view gives associative models as part of a top-down characterization of psychological processes of any kind and of any complexity.
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Notes
The same question, whether association is merely ‘some’ causal relation between events, or a particular kind of intervening mechanism, applies to behaviorism. This can be loosely captured in the distinction between methodological behaviorism and radical behaviorism.
I do take the diversity of systems just mentioned to make even this weaker claim suspicious, but that will not figure into my argument against it here.
The requirement that mechanisms be ‘localized’ in some sense is controversial (Weiskopf 2011). But for present purposes, I need not be committed to any specific relation between cognitive models and neural realizers. All that my claim requires is that the psychological model implies something about the neural realizers.
This may not be true of certain uses of behaviorist models: if association is a relation between external stimuli (rather than representations), and one is not committed to any kind of realism about the association itself, then the model could be seen as a phenomenological model (see also footnote 1). Alternatively, an association between representations could be treated as the explanandum phenomenon (in fact, my view makes such a project more interesting than existing views; see Sect. 6). But this is not what associative models do.
For instance, I say here that my view takes associative models to be mechanism sketches while associative processing implies that they are mechanism schemata. One may perfectly reasonably draw the line in a different place, such that associative processing also implies that they are mechanism sketches. I draw the line where I do to highlight the differences that matter for the current discussion.
Hartley did distinguish associations between ideas from the neural vibrations that ‘cause’ them.
See Smolensky (1987). I focus on connectionist networks that are intended as models of some actual cognitive process. Many (perhaps most) connectionists do not interpret their models this way, instead treating them as how possibly models, or as explorations of the formalism. I set these networks aside. Note also that connectionists could build neural circuit models: my interest is in the content of the model, not the tradition in which it was built.
Note that a reductive associationist might take (say) connectionist models to imply a kind of processing which excludes symbolic processing, but not take this to imply that the process is simple (as with Abrahamson & Bechtel’s [1991] comment about ‘associationism with an intelligent face’ above). This ‘associative process’ may not face the problems discussed here, but still faces the problems of reductive associationism.
I discuss their arguments in Sect. 4.3.
This experiment actually used the related Japanese quail, not pigeons. But this is an integrated literature, largely driven by the same labs. They see the two species as related enough to bear on one another, so I will treat them that way as well.
I do not argue that there are no processes that fall in the space traditionally called ‘associative processing’ (as does, most famously, Gallistel 1990, 2000). That is to say, there may be processes for which no psychological model can be provided except for an associative model. But this discussion does imply that we should rethink the ways we engage with processes like this. The successful use of an associative model is not sufficient reason to consider a process to belong to this class. And these processes have no special claim to associative models; rather, they are defined by the failure of other kinds of models like cognitive models. A name that better reflects the actual basis of the class, like ‘non-cognitive processing,’ would lead to less confusion.
In effect, this is the inverse move of reductive associationism: Reductive associationists believe that association should be pitched at a lower level of description than it was traditionally (perhaps the level of ‘functional architecture,’ which Pylyshyn (1984) places below the algorithmic level). I argue that associative models should be pitched at a higher level of description (more like Pylyshyn’s ‘semantic’ level, similar to Marr’s (1982) computational level, though not exactly the same).
The Rescorla–Wagner model describes a process whereby associative strengths are adjusted based on errors in predictions that association generates. But, putting the point above more specifically, this should not be taken to imply a kind of mechanism of prediction error. That would run into my arguments against associative processing. In general, most in the field do not take the ‘prediction’ literally or realistically, even if they do so with the association (Danks 2013, 2014).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Ron Mallon, Carl Craver, John Doris, David Danks, Cameron Buckner, Lauren Olin, Joe McCaffrey, and Marta Halina for helpful comments on drafts. Thanks to participants in various working groups and reading groups at WashU where I presented material related to this paper over the years, and to Gualtiero Piccinini and Daniel Povinelli for helpful discussions. Finally, I’d like to thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.
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Dacey, M. Rethinking associations in psychology. Synthese 193, 3763–3786 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1167-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1167-0