Why Desire Reasoning is Developmentally Prior to Belief Reasoning

Word count: 11.765 Abstract: The predominant view in developmental psychology is that young children are able to reason with the concept of desire prior to being able to reason with the concept of belief. We propose an explanation of this phenomenon that focuses on the cognitive tasks that competence with the belief and desire concepts enable young children to perform. We show that cognitive tasks that are typically considered fundamental to our competence with the belief and desire concepts can be performed with the concept of desire in the absence of competence with the concept of belief, whereas the reverse is considerably less feasible.