Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

Empiricist philosopher John Locke coined the phrase association of ideas,
which first appeared as a chapter title in the fourth edition of An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (Locke, 1977). Locke’s work was an explicit reaction against
Cartesian philosophy (Thilly, 1900); his goal was to establish experience as the foundation
of all thought. He noted that connections between simple ideas might not
reflect a natural order. Locke explained this by appealing to experience:
Ideas that in themselves are not at all of kin, come to be so united in some men’s
minds that it is very hard to separate them, they always keep in company, and the
one no sooner at any time comes into the understanding but its associate appears
with it. (Locke, 1977, p. 122)
Eighteenth-century British empiricists expanded Locke’s approach by exploring
and debating possible laws of association. George Berkeley (1710) reiterated
Aristotle’s law of contiguity and extended it to account for associations involving
different modes of sensation. David Hume (1852) proposed three different laws of
association: resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause or effect. David
Hartley, one of the first philosophers to link associative laws to brain function, saw
contiguity as the primary source of associations and ignored Hume’s law of resemblance
(Warren, 1921).
Debates about the laws of association continued into the nineteenth century.
James Mill (1829) only endorsed the law of contiguity, and explicitly denied Hume’s
laws of cause and effect or resemblance. Mill’s ideas were challenged and modified by
his son, John Stuart Mill. In his revised version of his father’s book (Mill & Mill, 1869),
Mill posited a completely different set of associative laws, which included a reintroduction
of Hume’s law of similarity. He also replaced his father’s linear, mechanistic
account of complex ideas with a “mental chemistry” that endorsed nonlinear emergence.
This is because in this mental chemistry, when complex ideas were created via
association, the resulting whole was more than just the sum of its parts. Alexander
Bain (1855) refined the associationism of John Stuart Mill, proposing four different
laws of association and attempting to reduce all intellectual processes to these laws.
Two of these were the familiar laws of contiguity and of similarity.
Bain was the bridge between philosophical and psychological associationism
(Boring, 1950). He stood,
exactly at a corner in the development of psychology, with philosophical psychology
stretching out behind, and experimental physiological psychology lying
ahead, in a new direction. The psychologists of the twentieth century can read
much of Bain with hearty approval; perhaps John Locke could have done the
same. (Boring, 1950, p. 240)
One psychologist who approved of Bain was William James; he frequently cited
Bain in his Principles of Psychology (James, 1890a). Chapter 14 of this work provided
Elements of Connectionist Cognitive Science 135