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'