The better question would have been “how do people identify objects which behave like integers?”.
The same way we identify objects which satisfy any other predicate? We determine whether or not something is a cat by comparing it to our knowledge of what cats are like. We determine whether or not something is dangerous by comparing it to our knowledge of what dangerous things are like.
Why do you ask this question specifically of the integers? Is there something special about them?
So does electricity. (And it does so exactly, whereas water contains different isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen...)
Anyway, I seem to recall seeing a Wikipedia article about some obscure language where the word for ‘water’ is grammatically plural, and thinking ‘who knows if they’ve coined a backformed singular for “water molecule”, at least informally or jocularly’.
(Note also that natural languages don’t seem to have fixed rules for whether nouns like “rice” or “oats”—i.e. collections of small objects you could count but you would never normally bother to—are mass nouns or plural nouns.)
If you’re going to insist that different isotopes disrupt the whole number quality of water, then fractional-charge quasiparticles would like a word with your allegation that electricity can be completely and exactly modeled using integers.
The ancestral environment included people (who behave like integers over moderate time spans) and water (which doesn’t behave like integers)..
The better question would have been “how do people identify objects which behave like integers?”.
The same way we identify objects which satisfy any other predicate? We determine whether or not something is a cat by comparing it to our knowledge of what cats are like. We determine whether or not something is dangerous by comparing it to our knowledge of what dangerous things are like.
Why do you ask this question specifically of the integers? Is there something special about them?
Water does behave like very large integers.
So does electricity. (And it does so exactly, whereas water contains different isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen...)
Anyway, I seem to recall seeing a Wikipedia article about some obscure language where the word for ‘water’ is grammatically plural, and thinking ‘who knows if they’ve coined a backformed singular for “water molecule”, at least informally or jocularly’.
(Note also that natural languages don’t seem to have fixed rules for whether nouns like “rice” or “oats”—i.e. collections of small objects you could count but you would never normally bother to—are mass nouns or plural nouns.)
If you’re going to insist that different isotopes disrupt the whole number quality of water, then fractional-charge quasiparticles would like a word with your allegation that electricity can be completely and exactly modeled using integers.
Touché.