Imagine an impure associationist model of the mind, one that contains both propositional and associative structures. A computational inference might be one such as inferring  you are a g from the thoughts  if you are an f, then you are a g, and  you are an f. However, an associative transition is just a stream of ideas that needn’t have any formal, or even rational, relation between them, such as the transition from  this coffee shop is cold to russia should annex idaho,  without there being any intervening thoughts. This transition could be subserved merely by one’s association of  idaho and cold, or it could happen because the two thoughts have tended to co-occur in the past, and their close temporal proximity caused an association between the two thoughts to arise (or for many other reasons). Regardless of the etiology, the transition doesn’t occur on the basis of the formal properties of the  thoughts.[24]