سوال ۲۳ کنکور ارشد ریاضی ۱۴۰۴

PASSAGE 3

The human brain is unique in the animal kingdom in its ability to gain access to abstract mathematical truths. How this singular cognitive ability evolved in the primate lineage is currently unknown. According to one hypothesis, mathematics, like other cultural abilities that appeared suddenly with modern humans in the upper Paleolithic, is an offshoot of the human language faculty — for Noam Chomsky, for instance, “the origin of the mathematical capacity [lies in] an abstraction from linguistic operations”. Many mathematicians and physicists, however, disagree and insist that mathematical reflection is primarily nonlinguistic — Albert Einstein, for instance, stated: “Words and language, whether written or spoken, do not seem to play any part in my thought processes.”

An alternative to the language hypothesis has emerged from recent cognitive neuroscience research, according to which mathematics arose from an abstraction over evolutionarily ancient and nonlinguistic intuitions of space, time, and number. Indeed, even infants and uneducated adults with a drastically impoverished language for mathematics may possess abstract proto-mathematical intuitions of number, space, and time. Such “core knowledge” is predictive of later mathematical skills and may therefore serve as a foundation for the construction of abstract mathematical concepts.

Linguistic symbols may play a role, possibly transiently, in the scaffolding process by which core systems are orchestrated and integrated. Furthermore, mathematics encompasses multiple domains, and it seems possible that only some of them may depend on language. For instance, geometry and topology arguably call primarily upon visuospatial skills whereas algebra, with its nested structures akin to natural language syntax, might putatively build upon language skills.

23 — According to the passage, which of the following statements is true?