The Pirahã Are Off By One
The Pirahã are a tiny Amazonian tribe, famous for the fact that there number system has three numbers: one, two, and many. This is seen as proof of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that words determine the concepts you can use: Pirahã can’t instantly compare collections of objects to see which is bigger (e.g. a pile of four batteries next to a pile of five) while people in cultures with other number systems can. On the other hand, it’s also seen as a refutation of Sapir-Whorf, on the grounds that the subsistence hunter-gatherers never really need to count, so the words clearly follow the concept rather than the other way around.
I don’t know for sure, but I do know that the Pirahã are nearly correct, just off by one. To a first approximation, for anything you can name, there’s either zero of it, exactly one, or pretty much infinitely many. There’s one me, only one you. There’s a pretty much unlimited supply of people — if you counted seven billion humans, one per second, without stopping to eat or sleep, it would take you 222 years. There are, for almost everyone’s purposes, infinitely many human beings. But most of the possible subsets of humans are empty: ten-foot-tall humans, humans who have lived on Mars, etc.
I didn’t think about this because I was thinking about linguistics. I thought of this because I was waiting for a database query to finish. It occured to me that…