The associationist mindset

WhenAristotelian-Thomistic philosophers say that human beings are by naturerational animals, they don’t mean that human beings always reason logically(which, of course, is obviously not the case). They mean that human beings by nature have the capacity for reason, unlike other animals.  Whether they exercise that capacity well isanother question.  Human beings are oftenirrational, but you have to have the capacity for reason to be irrational.  A dog or a tree doesn’t even rise to the levelof irrationality.  They are non-rational, not irrational.

Rationality,on the Aristotelian-Thomistic account, involves three basic capacities: tograsp abstract concepts (such as the concept of being a man or the concept of beingmortal); to put concepts together into complete thoughts or propositions(such as the proposition that all men aremortal); and to reason logically from one proposition to another (as whenwe reason from the premises that all menare mortal and that Socrates is a manto the conclusion that Socrates is mortal).  Logic studies the ways concepts can becombined into propositions and the ways propositions can be combined intoinferences.  Deductive logic studies,specifically, inferences in which the conclusion is said to follow from thepremises of necessity; and inductive logic studies inferences in which it issaid to follow with probability.

Any adequatephilosophical or psychological theory of the human mind has to be consistentwith our possession of these capacities. Many such theories fail this test, but might accurately describe somenon-human creatures.  For example,Skinnerian behaviorism is hopeless as a theory of human nature, and isn’t evenplausible as a description of many of the higher animals.  But asDaniel Dennett suggests, it might be true of simple invertebrateslike sea slugs.  (It is also possible fora theory to do justice to our rational capacities, but still fail in some otherrespect accurately to describe human nature. For example, Cartesian dualism does so insofar as it wrongly takes the humanintellect to be a complete substance in its own right stocked with innate ideas.  But this is at least an approximation of whatangelic minds are like.)

Then thereare theories which get the human mind wrong, but nevertheless afford an approximatedescription of what a certain kind of disorderedthinking is like.  Consider the disputebetween voluntarism and intellectualism. For the intellectualist, the intellect is prior to the will in the sensethat the will is of its nature always directed at what the intellect judges tobe good.  Voluntarism, which comes indifferent forms, seriously modifies or denies this claim. Like other Thomists,I take intellectualism to be the correct view. But asI have argued elsewhere, with a certain kind of irrationality it is as if the person’s will floated free ofhis intellect.  (I’ve labeled this “thevoluntarist personality.”)

Anotherexample, I want to suggest here, is afforded by associationism.  Associationisttheories attempt to account for all transitions from one mental state toanother by reference to causal connections established via experience.  For example, David Hume famously positedthree principles of association: resemblance,contiguity in time or space, and cause and effect.  Resemblance has to do with how one idea mighttrigger another because of some similarity between the things represented bythe ideas.  For instance, seeing anorange might cause you to think of a basketball because they are similar inshape and color; smelling the marijuana smoke wafting from a nearby apartmentmight call to mind a skunk because the odor is similar; and so on.  Examples involving contiguity in time orspace would be the way that thinking about World War II might bring to mind thesound of swing music (since it was popular at the time of the war), or the waythat seeing the White House might generate an image of the Washington Monument,since they are in the same city. Examples involving cause and effect would be the sight of a puddle onthe ground triggering the thought of rain (since that is often a puddle’scause) and the thought of a gun generating a mental image of a dead man (sincethat is often a gun’s effect).

Notice thatall of these relations are sub-rational.  Suppose that, by way of the operation ofHume’s three principles, some particular person somehow developed a strongtendency to have the thought that it’sraining in Cleveland every time it occurred to him that it is now five o’clock just as heremembered that Charles is the currentking of England.  Obviously, thatwould not entail the validity of the following argument:

It is now five o’clock

Charles is the current king of England

Therefore,it’s raining in Cleveland

That is tosay, the causal relations by whichone thought might come to generate another are not the same thing as the logical relations by which oneproposition might entail another.  As aresult, associationist theories, even if they might provide plausible accountsof the mental processes of some non-human animals, simply cannot account forthe rational powers that set human beings apart from other animals.  For the causal relations they posit do notsuffice to guarantee that the right logicalrelations will hold between the thoughts governed by those causal relations.  

This is alongstanding problem for associationist theories.  In contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitivescience, and artificial intelligence research, the most influential variationon associationism is known as connectionismor the “neural network” approach.  It hasbeen vigorously criticized by thinkers like Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn forits inability to account for the rationality of thought.  What connectionist models (and the AI builton them) are good at is patternrecognition.  But sensitivity topatterns is not the same thing as a grasp of the logical relationships betweenconcepts and propositions.  If all we didwas pattern recognition, we would not be capable of the valid inferences thatwe carry out all the time.

Likevoluntarism, though, associationism is not a bad approximate description ofcertain disordered habits of thinking.  For many people’s minds seem to operate as if they were governed by purelyassociationist principles.  Inparticular, those chronically prone to fallacious reasoning are like this.  For many logical fallacies involve a kind ofjumping to conclusions on the basis of an association between ideas that seems tight but is in fact too weak to grounda deductively valid or even inductively strong inference.

The mostobvious example involves a fallacy that happens to go by the name of “guilt byassociation.”  Suppose someone reasons asfollows: “Chesterton criticized capitalism, and communists criticizecapitalism, so Chesterton must have been a communist.”  The premises are true but the conclusion isfalse.  The speaker is assuming thatbecause communism is associated with criticism of capitalism and Chesterton isassociated with criticism of capitalism, it is reasonable to associateChesterton with communism.  The reasonthis is fallacious, of course, is that though all communists are critics ofcapitalism, the converse is not true – not all critics of capitalism arecommunists. 

Sometimeswhen people commit this fallacy, they give it up immediately once it is pointedout to them.  That is a good indicationthat the psychological source of the error is simply that they made theinference too quickly or inattentively, nothing more.  But sometimes people are very reluctant togive up such an argument even after the error is explained to them.  For example, suppose someone argues: “Racistsare opposed to illegal immigration and you are opposed to it, so you must be aracist.”  The fallacy here is exactly thesame.  Even if all racists are opposed toillegal immigration, the converse is not true, so the conclusion does notfollow.  But people can be very reluctantto give up this argument even though it is a straightforward case of thefallacy of guilt by association.  That isan indication that there is more going on here than merely too hasty aninference.

I’d proposethat an additional factor is a further association in the speaker’s mind.  It’s not just that the speaker associates theidea of opposition to illegalimmigration with the idea ofracism.  There are, in addition, strong emotional associations at work.  The speaker has a strongly negative emotional reaction to opposition toillegal immigration, and one that is similar to the strongly negative emotionalreaction he has to racism.  Hence eventhough there isn’t the needed logical connection to make the inference frompremise to conclusion valid, the emotionalconnection between the ideas makes it hard for the speaker to give up theconclusion that you must be a racist.  Thisassociation is merely psychologicalrather than logical, so the inference remains fallacious, but the strength ofthe association makes it nevertheless difficult for the speaker to see that.

Otherfallacies too involve jumping to conclusions on the basis of an associationthat seems logical but is in fact merely psychological, rendering the inferencefallacious but easy to fall into. Consider the “straw man” fallacy, wherein the speaker attacks acaricature of his opponent’s position rather than anything the opponent has actuallysaid.  For instance, suppose you express theview that the Covid lockdowns did no net good but caused grave economic andpsychological harm, and in response someone accuses you of being a libertarianwho puts individual freedom ahead of the lives of others.  The speaker is misrepresenting your position,making it sound as if your view is that even though the lockdowns saved lives,your right to do what you want trumps that.  But that is not what you said.  What you said is that they did not save lives and in addition causedgrave harm, and you made no appeal to any libertarian premises.

Here too itis psychological associations rather than logical connections that account forthe error.  The speaker associatesopposition to lockdowns with libertarianism (perhaps on the basis of a furtherfallacy of guilt by association, or because the lockdown critics he’s dealtwith before happen to have been libertarians, or for some other reason).  The one idea simply happens to trigger the other one in his mind, andthus he supposes that you must be a libertarian and attacks the straw man.  The causalconnection between the ideas makes the inference quite natural for him, but itdoes not make it logical.

Yet other fallaciesare plausibly generated by such associationist psychological mechanisms.  Take the “circumstantial ad hominem” fallacy, also known as the fallacy of appeal tomotive.  This involves rejecting a claimor argument merely on the basis of some suspect motive attributed (whethercorrectly or incorrectly) to the person advocating it.  For example, suppose some writer gives anargument to the effect that cutting taxes would promote economic growth, andyou dismiss it on the grounds that it reflects mere self-interest on his part,or because the writer works for a think tank which is known for advocating suchpolicies.  The problem with this is thatwhether the argument is sound or not is completely independent of the motivesof the person giving it.  A person withbad motives can give a good argument and a person with good motives can give abad argument.

However,motives are not alwaysirrelevant.  For example, they areimportant when evaluating the reliability of testimony or expert advice.  If the sole witness in a murder trial isindependently known to be hostile to the suspect, then that gives at least somereason to doubt his testimony implicating the suspect.  If a salesman assures you that the product hesells is the best on the market, the fact that he has a motive to sell it toyou gives you reason to doubt him despite his expertise regarding products ofthat kind.

In a fallacyof appeal to motive, what no doubt often happens is that, on the basis ofexamples like these, the person committing the fallacy forms a psychologicalassociation between having a suspectmotive and being untrustworthy.  Then, when he encounters an argument given bysomeone he suspects of having a bad motive, he goes on to associate being untrustworthy not just with theperson in question but with the argumentthe person gives.  But again, thesoundness or otherwise of an argument is independent of the character of theperson who gives it, so that this transference is fallacious.  Once again, the causal connection between theideas makes an inference seem natural, despite it’s not actually being logical.

There areyet other kinds of irrationality that can plausibly be said to reflectassociationist psychological mechanisms. ElsewhereI’ve argued that “wokeness” can be characterized as “a paranoid delusionalhyper-egalitarian mindset that tends to see oppression and injustice where theydo not exist or greatly to exaggerate them where they do exist.”  An example would be the way that mild or evenentirely innocuous language in some vague way related to race is frequentlyshrilly denounced by wokesters as “racist.” For example, the well-known market chain Trader Joe’s sells a Mexican beerlabeled “Trader Jose’s,” and Chinese food products labeled “Trader Ming’s.”  To any sane mind, there is nothing remotelyobjectionable about this.  In particular,there is nothing in these labels that entails the slightest degree of hostilitytoward Mexican or Chinese people.  Butthe woke mind is not sane, and, unsurprisingly, therewas a call a few years back to drop these labels (which, wisely, the chaindecided to ignore).

What seemsto be going on is that in the mind of the wokester, labels like these triggerthe idea of race, which in turntriggers the idea of racism, and thestrongly negative emotional associations of the latter in turn set up asimilarly negative emotional association with the labels.  There is no logical connection at all, but the strength of the psychologicalassociations makes the fallacious inference seem natural.  The woke mind is analogous to an overlysensitive smoke alarm, which blares out its obnoxious warning any time someonemerely breathes too hard.  (In the articlelinked to, I discuss some of the disordered psychological tendencies which leadto the formation of such bogus associations.)

Anotherexample of fallaciously associationist thinking would be the construction of fanciful“narratives” that seem to lend plausibility to dubious conspiracy theories ofboth left-wing and right-wing kinds.  I’veelaborated on this elsewhere and so direct interested readers to thatearlier discussion.

Naturally,since they are human beings, even people who exhibit what I am calling “theassociationist mindset” do in fact possess rationality, which is why they cancome to see their errors.  Their mindsare not in fact correctly described by associationist psychologicaltheories.  But reason is so weak in themand the mechanisms in question so strong that they can often behave as if these theories were true ofthem.  They seem to be disproportionatelyrepresented in social media contexts like Twitter.  And in fact such social media seem to fosterassociationist habits of thought, inways I’ve discussed before.