Abstract
For some years now I have been studying the nature of mathematical concepts in certain societies which were traditionally hunters and are now adopting portions of industrial technology (Denny, 1981). The general aim of this research is to discover major variables in the structure of thinking that are influenced by the type of subsistence system, whether hunting, some kind of agriculture, or industry. One of the most pervasive variables to emerge is the integration of contextual information with focal information, for thinking processes in hunting societies (and also agricultural ones), but not in industrial society. In the first part of this paper I will describe how even the simplest of mathematical concepts is encoded in the language of a hunting society so that some context is represented together with the main concept, e.g., it is not possible to say ‘two’ but at a minimum ‘two-elements’ or ‘two-sets.’
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© 1983 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Denny, J.P. (1983). Context in the Assessment of Mathematical Concepts from Hunting Societies. In: Irvine, S.H., Berry, J.W. (eds) Human Assessment and Cultural Factors. NATO Conference Series, vol 21. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2151-2_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2151-2_12
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