Abstract

In this article we reject "aggregative thinking" (Frege, 1884) in Arithmetic and symbolic neuro-cognition (Dehaene 1997, 2007), in two moments. The first directed against the additive perspective: the idea that a number is itself the result of an accumulation of "units". The second against the combinatorial perspective: the idea that the number so as the natural word are the result of an exercise in combinatorial calculus, and not rather its necessary and irreducible premise. Our proposal: the number is at once the seed and a resulting object of a more general hermeneutic activity of the human mind. The symbolization skill that at present is called "numeracy" is therefore reinterpreted as a special form of "literacy".