| Description |
1 online resource (444 p.) |
| Contents |
Cover -- Half-title -- Title page -- Copyright information -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgments -- Foreword -- Preface -- 1 Numbers in a Nutshell -- What Numbers Are as Concepts -- The Working Definition of Number -- Analyzing Numbers through an Existing Familiarity -- Who Has Numbers? And Do We All Have the Same Numbers? -- Variability between Cultural Number Systems -- Explaining Cross-Cultural Variability -- Change within Any Particular Cultural Tradition -- Are Numbers Ever the Same, and If So, How Are They the Same? -- 2 Converging Perspectives on Numbers |
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Historical Ideas about Where Numbers Come From -- Four Recent Models of Numerical Origins -- Historical Change in How We Study Number Systems -- The Contributions and Challenges of Archaeology -- 3 The Brain in Numbers -- Numerosity, the Innate Sense of Quantity -- Categorization and Abstraction -- The Mental Number Line -- The Parietal Lobe and Numbers -- The Cerebellum and Numbers -- Finger-Counting and the Brain -- 4 Bodies and Behaviors -- How Numbers Emerge and the Roles of the Fingers -- How Using the Fingers Patterns Numerical Structure and Language -- Finger-Counting in Proto-Languages |
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The Visual Experience of the Hand -- Movement and Material Engagement -- Counting Behaviors When Numbers Are Few -- 5 Language in Numbers -- What Language Reveals about Numbers -- Lexical Numbers, Finger-Counting, and Analyzability -- Evidence for Numerosity in Ancient Languages -- Numerical Organization and Structure -- Necessary and Sufficient Conditions -- 6 Global and Regional Patterns -- The Global Pattern: Numerical Emergence and Prehistoric Migration -- The Regional Pattern: Numerical Elaboration and Socio-Material Complexity -- Cultural Analogies -- 7 Materiality in Numbers |
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Recruiting New Devices as the Mechanism of Numerical Elaboration -- Representing and Manipulating -- Materially Anchored Conceptual Blending -- General Effects of Material Culture -- Accumulating and Distributing Cognitive Effort -- Change under Conditions of Common Use -- 8 Materiality in Cognition -- Cognition Is Extended and Enactive -- Materiality Has Agency -- Enactive Signification -- Sustained Collaboration, Common Creativity -- 9 Making Quantity Tangible and Manipulable -- Gaining Control of Quantity Percepts -- The Instrumental Body -- Using the Hand as a Material Device for Counting |
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The Hand's Influence on Verbal Expressions -- Finger-Counting Age -- 10 Tallies and Other Devices That Accumulate -- Devices That Accumulate -- Tallying and Numerical Organization and Structure -- Taking Up the Material (Noncorporeal) Tally -- Tokenization -- Tallying without Words -- 11 Interpreting Prehistoric Artifacts -- Mark-Making and Prehistoric Numbers -- Archaeological Techniques for Interpreting Prehistoric Marks -- A Cautionary Tale: The Australian Message Sticks -- Interpreting Palaeolithic Artifacts as Possible Tallies -- Functional Considerations |
| Summary |
This book addresses the material devices used to represent and manipulate numerical concepts. Fingers, tallies, tokens, and written notations, invented in both ancestral and contemporary societies, explain what numbers are, why they are the way they are, and how we get them |
| Notes |
Description based upon print version of record |
|
12 Devices That Accumulate and Group |
| Form |
Electronic book
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| Author |
Wynn, Tom
|
| ISBN |
9781009361286 |
|
1009361287 |
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