Here’s a piece about an MIT research team study on an Amazonian tribe that has no word for numbers. They use quantifiers like “some”, “all”, and “most”.
Is this good news for nominalists?
Here’s a piece about an MIT research team study on an Amazonian tribe that has no word for numbers. They use quantifiers like “some”, “all”, and “most”.
Is this good news for nominalists?
Ah yes, the old “One, Two, Many” thing.
Years ago when this research came out, my hyper-Platonist (read: near-Pythagorean) professor scoffed at this, echoing Chomsky (also a hardcore Platonist), among other comments, saying:
“Even if they don’t have a referential term for it, if you steal five goats from someone who belongs to this tribe, they’re going to know exactly how many goats they had before and after the theft.”
I suppose that she’s right. The real implication of the research, from what I remember a few years ago, is that it challanged Chomsky’s theory universal grammar prima facie . Even though I am unfamiliar with their responses to the research, as far as I know, Chomskians in linguistics and philosophy of language haven’t changed since in light of it.
MC,
Yeah – I didn’t think it would be that easy to uproot Platonism just because some culture didn’t have words for the numbers. Being able to get by without talking about a thing surely couldn’t be evidence against the existence of the thing.
For example, if a tribe didn’t have a word for cats and coveniently had their language worked out so that they never had to refer to cats, even cats that they owned – there would still be cats.