Human evolution; innate number sense in babies (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, February 16, 2023, 00:10 (436 days ago) @ David Turell

Giant review article which comes down on the side, yes they do:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/babies-are-born-with-an-innate-number-sense/

"In the 17th century John Locke rejected this idea, insisting that the human mind begins as a tabula rasa, or blank slate, with almost all knowledge acquired through experience. This view, known as empiricism, in contrast to Plato's nativism, was later further developed by John Stuart Mill, who argued that we learn two plus three is five by seeing many examples where it holds true: two apples and three apples make five apples, two beers and three beers make five beers, and so on.

"In short, empiricism dominated philosophy and psychology until the second half of the 20th century, when nativist-friendly thinkers such as Noam Chomsky swung the pendulum back toward Plato. Chomsky focused on language, proposing that children are born with an innate language instinct that enables them to quickly acquire their first language with little in the way of explicit instruction.

"Others then extended Chomsky's hypothesis to mathematics. In the late 1970s cognitive scientists C. R. Gallistel and Rochel Gelman argued that children learn to count by mapping the number words in their language onto an innate system of preverbal counting that humans share with many other animals. In his landmark book The Number Sense, first published in 1997, French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene drew attention to the converging evidence for this preverbal system, helping researchers from diverse disciplines—animal cognition, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, education—realize they were all studying the same thing.

"In our 2021 paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, we argued that there is no longer a serious alternative to the view that humans and many nonhuman animals have evolved a capacity to process numbers. Whereas Plato proposed that we have innate mathematical knowledge, or a capacity to think about numbers, we argue that we have innate mathematical perception—an ability to see or sense numbers."

Comment: there follows an enormous number of studies arguing the point. Knowing the innate sense of numbers position they favor, studies they describe are barely convincing.