According to Cimpian & Salomon (C&S) our earliest inferences arise from a cognitive heuristic that predisposes us to attribute observed correspondences to inherent qualities of the involved entities. C&S propose that this inherence heuristic paves the way for the development of psychological essentialism, but they describe the heuristic itself as influencing reasoning indiscriminately across a wide range of topics and domains. In casting such a broad net, their characterization of early inferences ignores (or at least underplays) a distinctive element of childhood thought – specifically, children's grasp of agency, intentionality, and the life of the mind. We suspect this element deserves more attention in attempts to characterize early causal reasoning.

For several decades now, research on developing social cognition has attributed to young children some capacity to interpret events in terms of agency, intentionality, and (eventually) mental representations such as desires and beliefs (e.g., Bartsch & Wellman Reference Bartsch and Wellman1995; Wellman Reference Wellman1990). Evidence on children's developing theory of mind suggests that, in events involving humans, the fodder for children's “mental shotgun” (Kahneman's Reference Kahneman2011 term, as invoked by C&S) likely includes the intentional states of humans – their goals, emotions, “pro-attitudes” (Astington Reference Astington, Malle, Moses and Baldwin2001), intentions, and, eventually, beliefs and desires. From infancy (e.g., Onishi & Baillargeon Reference Onishi and Baillargeon2005), we seem poised to view phenomena involving humans and other animates as implicating goal-focused agency. Even toddlers can relate specific subjective desires to different individuals (Repacholi & Gopnik Reference Repacholi and Gopnik1997).

Indeed, there is reason to suppose that, from early on, we not only can view events from the perspective of an “intentional stance,” to use Dennett's (Reference Dennett1987) term, but we prefer to do so. Long ago, Piaget (Reference Piaget1929) noted children's tendency to credit even inanimate objects, on occasion, with some sort of intentionality, such that they explained cloud movements by attributing to clouds the desire to follow a child. Young children prefer to characterize actions in terms of mental/intentional states rather than in terms of behavioral descriptions (Lillard & Flavell Reference Lillard and Flavell1990).

Yet our predisposition for an intentional stance is downplayed in C&S's treatise. Indeed, in providing examples of inherence-based reasoning, the authors seem to go out of their way to avoid intention-related inferences, even when such inferences are quite plausible. For instance, C&S submit that a conclusion following the observation that girls often wear pink might be that “pink is an inherently delicate color” (sect. 1, para. 1; sect. 2.2.2, para. 1). We think that a more natural inference would be that girls like pink. The difference in these inferences is not trivial: The first attributes an inherent quality to the color pink, whereas the second attributes an (arguably) inherent quality to girls – specifically, a psychological quality of girls' intentional stance on colors.

Other examples offered by C&S can similarly be reinterpreted from a person-centered focus. For instance, we suspect that, in pondering why orange juice is typically consumed in the morning, most of us would assume a pivotal role for human agency, desires, and goals. Thus, the inference that orange juice has “energizing” qualities (suggested by C&S [sect. 2.2, para. 7; sect. 3.2, para. 4]) likely presumes there is a human actor who wants to be energized in the morning. When we infer that people wear heavier clothing in the winter because the weather is cold, we are surely assuming that people want to stay warm, and not that heavy clothing and cold weather are conjoined in some world apart from human desires and intentions.

The idea that young children bring an intentional orientation to their observations of correspondences – especially correspondences that have anything to do with human (or animate) activities – opens the door to alternative characterizations of the role of the inherence heuristic in development. It may, for instance, explain why inherent qualities are broadly inferred in childhood reasoning. Maybe our tendency to view animate agents as possessing internal qualities such as goals and desires begets the assumption that there are inherent qualities even in the physical world, such that eventually we are crediting correspondences to DNA and similar inherent constructs. A consideration of our tendency to bring a person-centered orientation to our first inferences may also help to explain our apparent satisfaction with the way things are: If the way things are is the way people want them to be, then maybe it's all good. So we assume a rightness about heavy coats being worn in the winter (we assume someone wanted it that way, maybe needed it that way, to achieve a desired goal), and similarly we assume justification for other correspondences (e.g., separate drinking fountains for those with white skin), at least until those arrangements are questioned, because we start with a cognitive framework in which human desire operates to achieve our goals.

We think some such alternative characterization – one that acknowledges our early recognition of agency and goal-directedness – better accommodates evidence that early cognition recognizes a domain distinction between physical and psychological/social/biological phenomena, consistent with developmental accounts such as Gopnik and Wellman's (Reference Gopnik, Wellman, Hirschfeld and Gelman1994) “theory-theory.” Moreover, this sort of alternative characterization, with its straightforward link to human narrative that necessarily assumes a rational network of desires, beliefs, intentions, and actions affords an easy path to the storytelling that, according to C&S, must be the end product of pattern detection.