Outside of these core uses of associationism the movement has also been closely aligned with a number of different doctrines over the years: empiricism, behaviorism, anti-representationalism (i.e., skepticism about the necessity of representational realism in psychological explanation), gradual learning, and domain-general learning. All of these theses are dissociable from core associationist  thought (see section 7). While one can be an associationist without holding those theses, some of those theses imply associationism to differing degrees. These extra theses’ historical and sociological ties to associationism are strong, and so will be intermittently discussed below.