 TTists of this stripe claim that the developmental paradox is an illusion. By their lights, the core concepts of FP never change even though the capacity to apply concepts comes in degrees. The variation in children’s performance, they propose, is the result of other complicating factors, such as the development of executive function capacities, working memory, and language abilities. On this view, the failure of explicit, verbal false belief tasks does not reveal a conceptual deficit, rather it reveals a deficit of performance rather competence (Carruthers 2013, 2016; Baillargeon, Scott, &amp; Bian 2016; Schönherr &amp; Westra 2019).