Associationism

History

Stuart Millet and Bain had had as precursors Hartley (1705 - 1757), David Hume (1711 - 1775), James Mill (1773 - 1836). Herbert Spencer reformed and supplemented the philosophy of association by introducing there the two ideas of the evolution and the Hérédité.

Concept

To appreciate the associationism, it is necessary, first of all, to be intended on the direction of the association term: it does not have, here, the general direction of connection (without what this theory would be indisputable, because it is obvious that with all its degrees the Pensée operates connections between certain elementary facts Psychique S); association in question in this case, it is the automatic and spontaneous evocation of psychological states by others psychological states. The associationism consists in supporting that all the mental life, including its highest demonstrations, is explained by automatic associative evocations determined by the order in which followed one another before our nervous impressions and the concomitant feelings of these impressions.

That association such as conceive it the Philosophe S of this school plays a big role in the very whole mental life, it is undeniable thing; it is a question of knowing if this role is exclusive, if it is enough for all to explain.

Are all the human Inclination S, all the Instinct S of the animal brought back they, in last Analyze, with invincible associations between certain representations, some emotional states, and certain movements? For such complex phenomena, and whose origin is still so obscure, the question is far from being solved.

Concerning the Knowledge, whose Psychologie is more advanced than that of the instincts and the feelings. it is an operation which it seems particularly difficult to bring back to an automatic evocation, it is the Raisonnement, because it is perceived by the Conscience as being primarily an effort of voluntary reflection. But, according to the associationism, the guiding principles of the reasoning (principles of identity, of causality, principle of the laws) derive from invincible associations that the accumulation of the experiments, either of the individual (Stuart Mill), or of the species (fI. Spencer), would have created in the spirit. Thus, while admitting even that the reasoning does not bring back itself to a simple associative evocation, it would rest at least on judgments which are results of association. “ Of the same , known as Spencer, that the living being undergoes and reflects all the variations of its medium, in the same way the thinking being must reflect the external, successive and simultaneous events: the intelligence is a correspondence. ”

The associationism particularly stuck to the explanation of the law of causality: the regular order of consecutions in the phenomena external would have invincibly associated in the spirit with the idea of phenomenon the idea of cause, i.e. of circumstances of which any phenomenon is the invariable consequence.

Criticisms

Criticisms addressed to this theory associationist of the law of causality relate to two points:

design of the cause and the report/ratio of causality in the school associationist;
the question of knowing if our belief in universal causality can be the result of the simple accumulation of the experiments. With the difference of Hume, of Bath and Stuart Millet, Spencer regards the principles of the reason and the whole of our faculties as resulting from the experiments of former generations, but as being innate, thanks to heredity, at the current individuals. By the form which it gave to the theory of association, it thus reconciled with the Empirisme the Théorie of the inneity.

See too

Empiricism
Evolutionism
Heredity

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