Perhaps the best way to understand the approach is with an analogy about childhood learning. When we tell toddlers about numbers, they have no idea about how they drive complex human activities (statistical analysis, for instance). Instead, numbers are words learned perhaps by memorizing a song that uses them ( “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe”).

The song is a placeholder of sorts, enabling the infant to refer to numbers without really using them properly. Over time, this morphs into an ability to identify one object at a time, then to refer to a pair of things, then to count up to five fingers on a hand, and so on.

Finally, by the time a child is four or five, they grasp the systemic concept behind numbers and can generalize their use for increasingly more complex tasks.