Verran, Helen. Science and an African Logic. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Main field/subfields and interlocutors: anthropology; linguistics; history of colonialism; postmodernism

Periodization: 20th century

Especially major people/places: Nigeria; Australia Relativism: the philosophical view that denies claims to objectivity

Main sources/archives: Personal experience; Colonial documents (ex: 1921 census of Ibadan, 95-99)

Main argument(s): What happens when basics of societies (way we think about numbers) come against each other? 'Critique of universalist understandings' (20)

Structure of book: 'These parts deal with the working so numbers, the generalising implicit in using numbers, and the certainty that seems to characterise judgements made through numbering' (20)

Part One: Introduction

• Experiences of teaching science to school teachers in Yoruba (Nigeria), including potential differences in numbering
• How can we change assumptions?

Part Two: Numbering

• Comparative Study between Yoruba and English Number Systems – contrasts may be rooted in how number names function grammatically in sentences
• How can we de-colonise number systems?
• Numbers can be culturally internalised

Part Three: Generalising

• Difference in the way English and Yoruba people generalise – how they combat each other

Part Four: Certainty

• Raises possibility of contested certainties
• Foundationalism (the view that some beliefs can justifiably be held by inference from other beliefs, Britannica) as explanatory framework is a mistake

Book Review: Gieryn, Thomas in American Journal of Sociology 108, no. 2 (2002): 34

Kenny, Martha. 'Counting, Accounting, and Accountability: Helen Verran's Relational Empiricism'. Social Studies of Science 45, no.5 (2015): 665-690.

Key points or interventions or sub-arguments by chapter: English language numeration - Indo-European (53-4)

• Adding in intervals of 1 or 10 in linear progression

Yoruba language numeration - base of 20 (55-62)

• 35 = (-5+(20×2))
• No parallel to zero (62)

'Holographic effect of numbers' - 'capacity to seamlessly connect a child sleeping on his mother's back in Ibadan with the ledgers of the British Empire' (100)

• Numbers are both unity and plurality

Yoruba numbers based on ritual series - connection to hands, feet, toes (110)

'Reworking my past relativist studies, I developed the proposal that Yoruba life emerges through and with a logic of whole/part organisation. In contrast, life in English language communities, and by extension science, emerges through and with a logic of one/many ordering' (220)

• Versions of each other - particular ways of doing 'unity/plurality'