Il talento matematico. La genesi dei concetti matematici tra cultura e scienze cognitive

Abstract

The current issues brought forward by neoculturalism revived in a certain way the old ontological debate about which is the true nature of mathematics and in primis of the natural numbers. In fact, the importance of the latter, for the purposes of this research is due to the fact that these are coextensive with particular space-time objects, that is to say numerals. If someone tells us that “two plus four is six”, we do not think he’s using a different language in which his “six” corresponds to our “eight” but we think that his arithmetic reasoning is simply wrong to make the sum of the two numbers (two and four) both call the same way. We think, therefore, that the numbers are accurate, that tells us the truth, and that are not exposed to any interpretation. Consequently, the numbers are merely numbers, regardless of the context in which they occur, regardless of the culture of single population. However, in recent years there have been some studies that go against this conception of common sense. This paper considers the impact of these different approaches, focusing in particular on studies of Pirahã, Munduruku, and Chinese numerical cognition