I had a fun mind-play with my kids; I asked them if numbers like "one" and "two" really exist. They said yes, of course.
OK, I said, show me a plain old "one". Nope, that's one fork; nope that's one ball; nope, you get the idea.
You cannot show just "one" unattached to anything else.
The concept of "one" is an idea. It only exists as a "real" concept in your mind because it exists as the same concept in the minds of others, and it's a very useful concept in describing the world around us.
This odd fact becomes ever more apparent when you find out about cultures that have very different approaches to quantitative reasoning, like the Pirahã in Brazil [1]. They don't have number words beyond "one", words roughly meaning "some" and "many" are used for anything more than one.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080714111940.h...
OK, I said, show me a plain old "one". Nope, that's one fork; nope that's one ball; nope, you get the idea.
You cannot show just "one" unattached to anything else.
The concept of "one" is an idea. It only exists as a "real" concept in your mind because it exists as the same concept in the minds of others, and it's a very useful concept in describing the world around us.
This odd fact becomes ever more apparent when you find out about cultures that have very different approaches to quantitative reasoning, like the Pirahã in Brazil [1]. They don't have number words beyond "one", words roughly meaning "some" and "many" are used for anything more than one.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080714111940.h...