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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+(20x2))
  * 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'