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Cognitive Foundations of Arithmetic: Evolution and Ontogenisis
Author(s) -
Carey Susan
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0017.00155
Subject(s) - naturalism , representation (politics) , object (grammar) , cognition , numerical cognition , cognitive science , foundation (evidence) , mental representation , psychology , computer science , epistemology , cognitive psychology , artificial intelligence , philosophy , history , neuroscience , archaeology , politics , political science , law
Dehaene (this volume) articulates a naturalistic approach to the cognitive foundations of mathematics. Further, he argues that the ‘number line’ (analog magnitude) system of representation is the evolutionary and ontogenetic foundation of numerical concepts. Here I endorse Dehaene’s naturalistic stance and also his characterization of analog magnitude number representations. Although analog magnitude representations are part of the evolutionary foundations of numerical concepts, I argue that they are unlikely to be part of the ontogenetic foundations of the capacity to represent natural number. Rather, the developmental source of explicit integer list representations of number are more likely to be systems such as the object–file representations that articulate mid–level object based attention, systems that build parallel representations of small sets of individuals.