Numbers as Cognitive Tools: An Empirically Informed Nominalistic Account of the Nature of Numbers by César Frederico dos Santos instant download

Numbers as Cognitive Tools: An Empirically Informed Nominalistic Account of the Nature of Numbers by César Frederico dos Santos instant download

The genesis of this book, initially a doctoral dissertation, arose from a parallel reading of Dutilh Novaes’s Formal Languages in Logic (2012) and Dehaene’s Number Sense (2011). I observed that Dutilh Novaes’s account of the role of formal languages in deductive reasoning could be almost directly translated to the role of numerals in numerical cognition. Dutilh Novaes shows that formalisms are cognitive technologies that enable us to overcome cognitive tendencies that make deductive inferences considerably hard for untrained minds. Dehaene, in turn, suggests that numerals have the power to sharpen our innate ability to approximately estimate cardinal sizes to the point of converting it into the ability to count and understand exact cardinal sizes. The analogy is clear: numerals are like formalisms in that both are part of humanly invented techniques that boost our cognitive abilities. The challenge, addressed in this book, was to give an account of the nature of numbers based on this insight.