The British Empiricists desired to have a thoroughgoing pure associationist theory, for it allowed them to lessen the load of innate machinery they needed to posit. Likewise, the behaviorists also tended to want a pure associationist theory (sometimes out of a similar empiricist tendency, other times because they were radical behaviorists like Skinner, who banned all discussion of mental representations). Pure associationists tend to be partial to a connection that Fodor (2003) refers to as “Bare-Boned Association”. The idea is that the current strength of an association connection between X and Y is determined, ceteris paribus, by the frequency of the past associations of X and Y. As stated, Bare-Boned Association assumes that associative structures encode, at least implicitly, the frequency of past associations of X and Y, and the strength of that associative bond is determined by the organism’s previous history of experiencing Xs and  Ys.[19]  In other words, the learning history of past associations determines the current functional profile of the  corresponding associative  structures.[20]