Associationalism and Core-Context Theory: The more problem of meaning

Let us recall merely that its main principle was the connection of ideas by their previous contiguity in space or tie and for some writers by their similarity, there were also the conditions of frequency, recency, vividness and so on by which such connections were strengthened. Perception for Titchener were aggregations of sensations joined together by the special laws of sensory connection and the laws of attention. For him one of the outstanding feature of perception was meaning. But ideas also have meanings, acquired by the same sort of process as in perception; and ideas are distinguished from perceptions in that they do not require a direct sensation from some outer object to arouse them. The association of ideas works not with simple sensory mete. Rials, as in the formation of percepts, but with larger complexes that are already formed, that already mean. Titchener was careful to insist that neither those bits of conscious experience that make up a percept nor those that make up a pattern of associated ideas link onto each other actively in the associative process. The simple occur. There connection is provided by the underlying physiological mechanism that explains association. Science for Titchener there was a common associative process at work in perception as well as in ideas we shall include his main contribution, the contest theory of perceptual house. The important context theory, extended and clarified by Boring (1946) as systematic of the earlier attempts. According to Titchener, A perception consists, in its earlier stage, of the three following items; 1. A number of sensations consolidated and incorporated into a group under the laws of attention and the special principle of sensory connection. 2. Images from past experience that supplement the sensation. 3. Meaning, the sensations are integrated and fused. Meaning is something that the sensations or images provide for one another. The context of sensation or images supplementing the core becomes less and less necessary. Images may reduce to some common denominator or a sysbolic kind of shorthand. The fact that context has thus faded out does not of course, indicate that meaning has ceased to exist.