Number Line Is Learned, Not Innate Human Intuition
From the post:
Tape measures. Rulers. Graphs. The gas gauge in your car, and the icon on your favorite digital device showing battery power. The number line and its cousins — notations that map numbers onto space and often represent magnitude — are everywhere. Most adults in industrialized societies are so fluent at using the concept, we hardly think about it. We don’t stop to wonder: Is it “natural”? Is it cultural?
Now, challenging a mainstream scholarly position that the number-line concept is innate, a study suggests it is learned.
The study, published in PLoS ONE April 25, is based on experiments with an indigenous group in Papua New Guinea. It was led by Rafael Nunez, director of the Embodied Cognition Lab and associate professor of cognitive science in the UC San Diego Division of Social Sciences.
“Influential scholars have advanced the thesis that many of the building blocks of mathematics are ‘hard-wired’ in the human mind through millions of years of evolution. And a number of different sources of evidence do suggest that humans naturally associate numbers with space,” said Nunez, coauthor of “Where Mathematics Comes From” and co-director of the newly established Fields Cognitive Science Network at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences.
“Our study shows, for the first time, that the number-line concept is not a ‘universal intuition’ but a particular cultural tool that requires training and education to master,” Nunez said. “Also, we document that precise number concepts can exist independently of linear or other metric-driven spatial representations.”
I am not sure how “universal intuition[s]” regained currency but I am glad someone is sorting this out, again.
Universal intuition is a perennial mistake that attempts to put some “facts” beyond dispute. They are “universal.”
I concede the possibility that “universal” intuitions exist.
But advocates always have some particular “universal” intuition they claim to exist, which oddly enough supports some model or agenda of theirs.
Anecdotal evidence to be sure but I have never seen an advocate of a particular “universal” intuition pushing for one that was contrary to their model or agenda. Could just be coincidence but I leave that to your judgement.
I offer this study as a evidence you can cite in the face of “universal” intuitions in databases, ontologies, logic, etc. They are all cultural artifacts that we can use or leave as suits our then present purposes.
For more information see: Núñez R, Cooperrider K, Wassmann J. Number Concepts without Number Lines in an Indigenous Group of Papua New Guinea. PLoS ONE, 7(4): e35662 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0035662
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