Abstract

Associationist thought has a very long history and has exerted a major influence, culminating between the philosophy of the classical age and the empirical psychology of the nineteenth century. Over the course of these three centuries, the association of ideas has undergone an extension that is both radical and paradoxical: what was initially intended to account for the aberrations of thought has gradually been given the status of a fundamental law of mental life, allegedly guaranteeing the scientificity of modern psychology. How did the principle of wanderings in thought, going beyond the framework of exceptions, come to designate universal regularities and the normal course of the life of the mind? The thesis defended in this article is that the history of associationism illustrates the growing awareness that thought is fundamentally based on precarious, biased, erroneous and even confabulatory mechanisms, and that the difference between reason and madness, knowledge and illusion, is perhaps only one of degree. The article also focuses on the performativity of such erroneous associationism, i.e., the real effects that associations of false ideas and false associations of ideas are likely to have on our thinking and behaviour.