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Full Idea
With Associationism there proved to be no way to get a rational mental life to emerge from the sorts of causal relations among thoughts that the 'laws of association' recognised.
Clarification
Because it is purely mechanical
Gist of Idea
Hume's associationism offers no explanation at all of rational thought
Source
Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 18)
Book Ref
Fodor,Jerry A.: 'Psychosemantics' [MIT 1993], p.18
A Reaction
This might not be true if you add the concept of evolution, which has refined the associations to generate truth (which is vital for survival).
3075 | Could a cloud have a headache if its particles formed into the right pattern? [Harman] |
2490 | Modern connectionism is just Hume's theory of the 'association' of 'ideas' [Fodor] |
2447 | Hume has no theory of the co-ordination of the mind [Fodor] |
12624 | Only the labels of nodes have semantic content in connectionism, and they play no role [Fodor] |
2991 | Hume's associationism offers no explanation at all of rational thought [Fodor] |
4998 | Instead of representation by sentences, it can be by a distribution of connectionist strengths [Kirk,R] |
3199 | Connectionism assigns numbers to nodes and branches, and plots the outcomes [Rey] |
3201 | Connectionism explains well speed of perception and 'graceful degradation' [Rey] |
3202 | Connectionism explains irrationality (such as the Gamblers' Fallacy) quite well [Rey] |
3200 | Pattern recognition is puzzling for computation, but makes sense for connectionism [Rey] |
2984 | Perceptions could give us information without symbolic representation [Lyons] |
7511 | Neural networks can generalise their training, e.g. truths about tigers apply mostly to lions [Pinker] |
7512 | There are five types of reasoning that seem beyond connectionist systems [Pinker, by PG] |
18562 | Connectionists cannot distinguish concept-memories from their background, or the processes [Machery] |