Empiricism is a general theoretical outlook, which tends to offer a theory of learning to explain as much of our mental life as possible. From the British empiricists through Skinner and the behaviorists  (see the entry on behaviorism) the main focus has been arguing for the acquisition of concepts (for the empiricists’ “Ideas”, for the behaviorists “responses”) through learning. However, the mental processes that underwrite such learning are almost never themselves  posited to be learned.[1] So winnowing down the amount of mental processes one has to posit limits the amount of innate machinery with which the theorist is saddled. Associationism, in its original form as in Hume (1738/1975), was put forward as a theory of mental processes. Associationists’ attempt to answer the question of how many mental processes there are by positing only a single mental  process: the ability to associate  ideas.[2]