Definition
Associationism
Associationism is the doctrine that all human cognition — learning, memory, reasoning, and every other mental process — reduces to the formation and combination of associations.
Under associationism, complex mental phenomena are networks of learned links between mental representations. No innate ideas or specialised cognitive modules are required beyond the basic capacity to form associations.
Three associations link three mental representations through Hume’s’s three laws: resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect.
Historical Proponents
Plato (c. 400 BC)
Early reflections on associative recall in the Phaedo: one perception can draw another along with it through a prior conjunction in experience.
David Hume (1711–1776)
Argued that ideas become associated through three natural relations — resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect — giving associationism its canonical early modern form.
Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936)
Demonstrated associative learning experimentally through classical conditioning, moving the doctrine from introspective philosophy into measurable behavioural mechanism.