ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses four issues: responses and reasoning; experiments; causal explanation; and age-norms. It shows that although methodological questions are relevant to each issue, dispute centres principally on substantive matters. Responses and reasoning that in many experimental studies of transitivity, developmentalists have either followed Braine's example in trying to eliminate linguistic responses completely or have severely minimised them, for the reasons discussed, by focusing instead on children's judgments. Experiments of Piaget's studies are interpreted to be 'experiments'. In causal explanation an assumption is made that it is not merely desirable but that the causation must be of a certain type, namely explanation through efficient causality. Special attention is given to the age of onset of operational thinking. According to Braine, the onset of transitive thinking is "substantially earlier" than the age of seven or eight years that Piaget suggests.
