The ontogenesis of number

When it comes to mankind's use and understanding of numbers, what are the simple facts of life? Are there any fundamental things which always apply? Are numbers part of a reality which exists independently of the lives and deaths of individual human beings and the rise and fall of civilizations’? (Restivo 1983: 231). If this is so, then the characteristics of numbers are largely defined in terms of the ways in which they can combine with one another, according to the rules of what we call ‘mathematics’, or, in confining its application to numbers, simply ‘arithmetic’. In that case, following Frege, we are confronted with ‘the principal problem of arithmetic.[…]How do we apprehend logical objects, in particular numbers?’ (Cited Hodes 1984). But whatever may be fundamental about numbers, one must still ask what are the simple facts of life, and much of this book is an attempt to answer this question in its relation to numbers.