Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 81 of 171
Language gives numbers their power
development cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Spelke calls this the “compositionality power” of language. It allows us to take the approximate sense of numerosity we are all born with and make sets out of the individual objects we estimate.43 Noam Chomsky has long claimed that it is in fact language that gives numbers their power, and that exact numbers can only exist because of the recursive structure of language.