ABSTRACT
While these four criticisms temper any strong conclusions one can make, we still believe that several matters of significance were accomplished in the preceding chapters. The theory advanced in this book constitutes a significant advance in sophistication over past theories of memory. HAM provides such major elaborations and extensions of the general associative approach that it is unclear to what extent the title "associationist" is appropriate to HAM. Although we began with the belief that HAM would be fairly faithful to the associationist tradition (Anderson, 1971 ), we were gradually forced to abandon this position as untenable. Rather, HAM has been labeled "Neo-Associationist" to acknowledge that it represents a mixture of methodological rationalism and empiricism. However, the book is more than an ambitious enterprise; it contains what we believe to be significant contributions of empirical, theoretical, and metatheoretical varieties. Among these contributions we would list the following points:
crucialassumptionsofourmodel,whatanexperimentalistwouldhavetodoto disprovethetheory.However,therearenosuchcrucialassumptions.HAMconsists ofacollectionofspecifictheoreticalclaims,noneofwhichareparticularlycrucial intheirownright.Ifanythingisatstake,itistheoverallplanorstructurethatis imposedupontheseparticularclaims.Thisstructureismoreorlessadirect consequenceoftheNeo-Associationistmethodologythatwehavefollowedin theoryconstruction.Nosimpleexperimentaltestcandisconfirmatheoretical methodology.Theultimatetestconcernsthegenerality,power,parsimony,and empiricalaccuracyofthetheorythatitgenerates.
