Editing Thought (section)

===Associationism===
An important view in the empiricist tradition has been [[associationism]], the view that thinking consists in the succession of ideas or images.<ref name="BritannicaThought"/><ref name="Doorey">{{cite book |last1=Doorey |first1=Marie |title=The Gale Encyclopedia of Science |url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/medicine/psychology/psychology-and-psychiatry/conditioning |chapter=Conditioning}}</ref><ref name="Veldt">{{cite book |last1=Van der Veldt |first1=J. H. |title=New Catholic Encyclopedia |url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/medicine/psychology/psychology-and-psychiatry/associationism |chapter=Associationism}}</ref> This succession is seen as being governed by laws of association, which determine how the train of thought unfolds.<ref name="BritannicaThought"/><ref name="Mandelbaum"/> These laws are different from logical relations between the contents of thoughts, which are found in the case of drawing inferences by moving from the thought of the premises to the thought of the conclusion.<ref name="Mandelbaum"/> Various laws of association have been suggested. According to the laws of similarity and contrast, ideas tend to evoke other ideas that are either very similar to them or their opposite. The law of contiguity, on the other hand, states that if two ideas were frequently experienced together, then the experience of one tends to cause the experience of the other.<ref name="BritannicaThought"/><ref name="Doorey"/> In this sense, the history of an organism's experience determines which thoughts the organism has and how these thoughts unfold.<ref name="Mandelbaum">{{cite web |last1=Mandelbaum |first1=Eric |title=Associationist Theories of Thought |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/associationist-thought/ |website=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University |access-date=23 October 2021 |date=2020}}</ref> But such an association does not guarantee that the connection is meaningful or rational. For example, because of the association between the terms "cold" and "Idaho", the thought "this coffee shop is cold" might lead to the thought "Russia should annex Idaho".<ref name="Mandelbaum"/>

One form of associationism is imagism. It states that thinking involves entertaining a sequence of images where earlier images conjure up later images based on the laws of association.<ref name="BorchertThinking"/> One problem with this view is that we can think about things that we cannot imagine. This is especially relevant when the thought involves very complex objects or infinities, which is common, for example, in mathematical thought.<ref name="BorchertThinking"/> One criticism directed at associationism in general is that its claim is too far-reaching. There is wide agreement that associative processes as studied by associationists play some role in how thought unfolds. But the claim that this mechanism is sufficient to understand all thought or all mental processes is usually not accepted.<ref name="Veldt"/><ref name="Mandelbaum"/>