Pavlov and associationism.

Holism and Associationism in Neuropsychology: An Anatomical Synthesis

Associationism without associative links: Thomas Brown and the associationist project.

There are two roles that association played in 18th-19th century associationism. The first dominates modern understanding of the history of the concept: association is a causal link posited to explain why ideas come in the sequence they do. The second has been ignored: association is merely regularity in the trains of thought, and the target of explanation. The view of association as regularity...

forthcoming in Brain and Mind 2(2), 2001 THE NEW ASSOCIATIONISM: A NEURAL EXPLANATION FOR THE PREDICTIVE POWERS OF CEREBRAL CORTEX

The ability to predict is the most important ability of the brain. Somehow, the cortex is able to extract regularities from the environment and use those regularities as a basis for prediction. This is a most remarkable skill, considering that behaviourally significant environmental regularities are not easy to discern: they operate not only between pairs of simple environmental conditions, as ...

The New Associationism: A Neural Explanation for the Predictive Powers of Cerebral Cortex

The ability to predict is the most important ability of the brain. Somehow, the cortex is able to extract regularities from the environment and use those regularities as a basis for prediction. This is a most remarkable skill, considering that behaviourally significant environmental regularities are not easy to discern: they operate not only between pairs of simple environmental conditions, as ...

I . P . Pavlov and the Freedom Reflex

Why was Ivan Pavlevich Pavlov so widely celebrated in the decades after 1900? As his story of the ‘freedom reflex’ illustrates, Pavlov often overstated his observations. By calling all innate behaviour a reflex and all learned behaviour a conditional reflex, he meant to eliminate consciousness and volition from science. Pavlov’s universal reflex explanation became the prototype for