Book Review: Numbers and the Making of Us: Counting and the Course of Human Cultures.

It appears that infants can distinguish precisely between small numbers such as one, two and three; they can also distinguish in an approximate way between large and small quantities as long as they are sufficiently different (e.g. quantities of 8 and 16 are seen as different; 8 and 12 not so), but they have no precise understanding of numbers more than three. It appears that formal number systems were originally developed to refer to very concrete and material quantities in the real world (e.g. the number of fingers on my hand, which is five - no more, no less), overcoming the fuzzy quantity perceptions that people are born with in relation to numbers greater than three. We show in our paper how that pseudo-objective number scheme was sustained by the political rationality of the concrete decisions it produced, rather than by the accuracy of the numbers themselves. [Extracted from the article]