Language and Number: Towards a Psychosemantics for Natural Language Quantifiers

How is the meaning of the word "most" related to human capacities for  detecting and comparing numerosities? One might think the answer is  both obvious and given by our best semantic theories: we understand  "most" in terms of a capacity to compare cardinal numbers.  We  provide some initial evidence against this view on the basis of  experimental evidence from children's understanding and from  psychophysical experiments of adults' understanding. First, we show  that even children who have no exact numerical competence for large  numbers are able to accurately compute the meaning of "most." Second,  we show that under conditions that make it impossible for adults to  access exact cardinality, they are still highly accurate in judging  the truth of a sentence containing "most". Finally, we argue against  a view that treats "most" as derived from a simple vote-counting  algorithm that yields cardinality relations without making reference  to cardinality (via Hume's Principle) and in favor of a view that  involves the approximate number system (analog magnitudes) found in  humans and other animals.