Busting Rocks · Accounting for Experience Without Using Numbers

[JonM]

If your boss asked you, as an accountant, to draw up a balance sheet and you gave him dots and lines, you'd be fired.

Unless, of course, your culture uses dots and lines to represent numbers. Which some have. You seem to be confusing capability with convention.

Likewise, if he asked you to do something more simple, such as "count the items in the warehouse and tell me how many" and you gave him a tally. He would look at it, and for every ||||| he would be increasingly displeased. When that /number/ of | reached, oh, about thirty, don't you think he would look at you as if you were crazy? How about when it reached 100? 1000? More?

Which is why decimal places and numeric bases were invented. Having a base ten system, for example, simply makes it more convenient to express large numbers. |||||||||||| and 12 (base 10) and 10 (base 12) and 14 (base 8) are all potential numbers, represented using different conventions. The first method, using | just takes more room.

Tallies are not numbers, and you know this in real life, but when it comes to something academic, you pretend that a tally is a number.A tally is not a number.

But you require the concept of numbers to make any use of a tally; otherwise, why bother? Say, for example, that there are a bunch of goats, and I tally them by making a mark on a stick, for each one, much as you describe. It is true that I do not even need to be able to count, let alone have complex numeric representation to accomplish this - just set up a one-to-one correspondence between marks and goats. I think that this is what you are getting at, yes?

But that stick is of no use, whatsoever, if you have no ability to count the result, later, or describe it to someone else. That requires numeric abstraction. If you have absolutely no concept of numeric abstraction - at least internally, if not linguistically - then you have no use for tallying, as you described. The minute you mentally convert goats (or whatever) into abstract representations and back again, you have the start of a numeric system. You can't really have one without the other, at least in any useful form.

 

[JonM]

You are using numbers and just representing them with groups of symbols. Counting is still required so numbers are in use, just in a more cumbersome way.

Exactly!

 

[Ovinomancer]

"Actually, tallies are counts. Like, definitionally."

No. If you look at the standard usage (and a dictionary's definition) of count, the word is inextricably intertwined with numbers

Note, you can also account for items to take a tally, making a notch in a stick for each item, e.g. That's not not counting. That's accounting. But I catch your drift and do not want to split hairs further.

Good to see that someone explicitly understands that tallies are not numbers.

Don't look up the definition of tally, then, for it may upset you.

And could you provide how you're defining accounting in this instance? The definitions I'm aware of require far more sophistication than counting does.

 

[Celebrim]

Don't look up the definition of tally, then, for it may upset you.

He probably shouldn't look up Sumerian, Egyptian, or Mayan numerals either.

And speaking of, as best as I can tell the problem is he's confusing the concept of number and numeral.

 

[Henry]

Not to nitpick, but i think White Wolf got there a while back, just using dots. The color coding was an interesting start point, but the i through iiii tallies kind of put it back into "numeric" symbolism for me.