The Development of Reasoning in Young Children

I 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. It is not our purpose to provide a detailed review of studies of child reasoning, especially as some of them have already become obsolete, and others are of secondary importance. Therefore, in the critical section of this study (carried out under the supervision of A.N. Leontiev), we have devoted principal attention to work that occupies a central position in contemporary bourgeois child psychology, generalizes the enormous factual material, and in its negative aspects reflects not so much the individual faults of the author of the study as the flaws in the whole