The Development of Reasoning in Young Children

Abstract

The development of reasoning in the child has been the object of numerous experimental and theoretical studies in child psychology. However, despite the considerable factual material gathered in these studies, the erroneous theoretical positions of most bourgeois authors has kept them from a proper understanding of the true causes and the nature of the development of reasoning in the child. Although these authors have incessantly repeated the word "development," they have given it a completely antidialectical meaning, understanding development either as a quantitative accumulation of factual knowledge and association or as the unfolding or expansion of innate capacities.