Deontic reasoning as a target of selection: reply to Astington and Dack

In their discussion of young children's deontic reasoning performance, Astington and Dack (2013) made the following claims: (1) Children need more cues to elicit cogent social norm reasoning than adults require, namely, explicit reference to authority; (2) Deontic reasoning improves with age, and this is evidence against a nativist view; (3) All evolutionary explanations of deontic reasoning advantages require positing a ''domain-specific deontic reasoning module."; and (4) young children excel at deontic reasoning because it is easier. Here, I refute each claim. Instead, I argue that (1) Social norm reasoning is one type of deontic reasoning that has been the target of selective pressure; (2) Development does not preclude nativism; (3) Epistemic utterances make no greater processing demands than deontic utterances; and (4) both adult and child norm reasoning performance is strongly influenced by reference to or implication of authority.