ABSTRACT
CHAPTER OVERVIEW This chapter focuses on the intriguing and enduring issue of how the mind acquires content. We begin with a brief treatment of the sources of human knowledge including empiricism, according to which, if you don’t experience it you don’t know it so, to enrich one’s knowledge and one’s self, it is important to be open to new experiences. Another source of knowledge is revelation, which is based upon dogma and faith with this source of knowledge widespread today, as we see, for example, in almost all religious movements around the world. We next turn to positivism, according to which true human knowledge is only derived from public, reliable, and consensual observations absent any subjective or metaphysical overlay or assumptions. The last source of human knowledge is associationism, which is the central topic of this chapter. Basically, associationism, considered by some to be the first school of psychology, grows out of empiricism, and represents a set of formal rules for the combination of ideas or experiences in the mind.
