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Full Idea
Our minds mainly reason about objects. Most cognitive problems we are faced with deal with particular objects, whether they are people or material things. Reasoning about them is what our minds are good at.
Gist of Idea
Our minds are at their best when reasoning about objects
Source
Thomas Hofweber (Number Determiners, Numbers, Arithmetic [2005], §4.3)
Book Ref
-: 'Philosophical Review 114' [Phil Review 2005], p.199
A Reaction
Hofweber is suggesting this as an explanation of why we continually reify various concepts, especially numbers. Very plausible. It works for qualities of character, and explains our tendency to talk about universals as objects ('redness').
Related Idea
Idea 19490 Make-believe can help us to reason about facts and scientific procedures [Yablo]
| 9998 | What is the relation of number words as singular-terms, adjectives/determiners, and symbols? [Hofweber] |
| 10000 | We might eliminate adjectival numbers by analysing them into blocks of quantifiers [Hofweber] |
| 10001 | An adjective contributes semantically to a noun phrase [Hofweber] |
| 10002 | '2 + 2 = 4' can be read as either singular or plural [Hofweber] |
| 10003 | Why is arithmetic hard to learn, but then becomes easy? [Hofweber] |
| 10004 | Our minds are at their best when reasoning about objects [Hofweber] |
| 10005 | Arithmetic doesn’t simply depend on objects, since it is true of fictional objects [Hofweber] |
| 10006 | First-order logic captures the inferential relations of numbers, but not the semantics [Hofweber] |
| 10008 | Arithmetic is not about a domain of entities, as the quantifiers are purely inferential [Hofweber] |
| 10007 | Quantifiers for domains and for inference come apart if there are no entities [Hofweber] |