On the Nature of Numerosity and the Role of Language in Developing Number Concepts

What is it about?

We respond to Caleb Everett’s (2013) critique of our 2012 Current Anthropology article “Numerosity, Abstraction, and the Emergence of Symbolic Thinking.” We refute Everett’s criticisms, including his claim that we overemphasized paleoanthropological evidence in our argument, noting that recent experimental research in numerical cognition comprised 60% of our references. We also identify two key misunderstandings by Everett, first, the idea that numerosity is not uniform in extant Homo sapiens (we believe that experimental findings, including those of Everett himself, demonstrate that quantity perception is cross-culturally uniform) and second, the idea that language necessarily shapes human numerosity (in fact, the two are largely independent cognitive processes, and the evidence shows that numerosity, as a perceptual primitive, precedes language, not the other way around as argued by Everett). We note our focus on the fundamental question of how discrete quantities emerge out of the undifferentiated ‘many’, given numerosity, and reiterate our 2012 suggestion that the answer lies in the interaction of quantity appreciation with material scaffolds.

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Photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash

Photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash

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