Construct · 3 fields · 6 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
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In grammar, number is the category that marks whether a word refers to one thing or to more than one, and in some languages to exactly two. Pāṇini set out this category for Sanskrit in the Aṣṭādhyāyī around the fifth century BCE, distinguishing singular, dual, and plural forms (ekavacana, dvivacana, bahuvacana), and Corbett's 2000 Number surveys how languages across the world build the same one-versus-many distinction into their words. The referent is a feature of words and of the agreement between them, read off the shape of nouns, pronouns, and verbs, not a quantity itself, an abstract mathematical object, or a capacity of the mind.[1][2]
In mathematics, a number is the abstract object that answers how many or how much, the thing a numeral names. Euclid gave the classical definition in Book VII of the Elements around 300 BCE, calling a number a multitude composed of units, and Whitehead and Russell's 1910 Principia Mathematica rebuilt number on logical foundations, defining a cardinal number as the class of all classes that can be matched one to one with a given class. The referent is a formal object of quantity, extended over the centuries from the counting numbers to the negative, rational, real, and complex numbers, and it is not a grammatical marking on a word or a perceptual estimate made by the brain.[3][4]
In psychology, the number sense is the mind's capacity to perceive and estimate quantity without counting, a fast and approximate grasp of how many things are present. Dantzig named the number sense in his 1930 Number: The Language of Science, arguing that people and some animals share a primitive faculty for telling small quantities apart, and Dehaene's 1997 The Number Sense developed it into the modern account of an approximate number system rooted in specific brain circuits. The referent is a cognitive and perceptual ability that can be measured in people and animals, distinct from a grammatical category marked on words or the abstract mathematical object that quantity is defined as.[5][6]
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