No abstract

In the literature on enculturation—the thesis according to which higher cognitive capacities result from transformations in the brain driven by culture—numerical cognition is often cited as an example. A consequence of the enculturation account for numerical cognition is that individuals cannot acquire numerical competence if a symbolic system for numbers is not available in their cultural environment. This poses a problem for the explanation of the historical origins of numerical concepts and symbols. When a numeral system had not been created yet, people did not have the opportunity to acquire number concepts. But, if people did not have number concepts, how could they ever create a symbolic system for numbers? Here I propose an account of the invention of symbolic systems for numbers by anumeric people in the remote past that is compatible with the enculturation thesis. I suggest that symbols for numbers and number concepts may have emerged at the same time through the re-semantification of words whose meanings were originally non-numerical.

In Thomasson's "easy" approach to ontology, recalcitrant ontological problems are purportedly solved through trivial and straightforward inferences from putatively uncontroversial premises. Easy ontology aims at putting aside the metaphysical quarrels that, according to Thomasson, have led philosophers to think that existence questions were hard to answer. In this paper, I argue that, even if we refrain from engaging in metaphysics and limit our investigations to conceptual and empirical matters, as the "easy" approach recommends, we cannot expect to answer disputed existence questions by trivial and straightforward inferences. The problem is that putative easy-arguments leave room for many contentious issues for which there is no trivial and straightforward answer. To illustrate this point, I discuss some aspects of the debates on the existence of human races and numbers.

Anti-exceptionalists about logic claim that logical methodology is not different from scientific methodology when it comes to theory choice. Two anti-exceptionalist accounts of theory choice in logic are abductivism (defended by Priest and Williamson) and predictivism (recently proposed by Martin and Hjortland). These accounts have in common reliance on pre-theoretical logical intuitions for the assessment of candidate logical theories. In this paper, I investigate whether intuitions can provide what abductivism and predictivism want from them and conclude that they do not. As an alternative to these approaches, I propose a Carnapian view on logical theorizing according to which logical theories do not simply account for pre-theoretical intuitions, but rather improve on them. In this account, logical theories are ameliorative, rather than representational.