Conventional models of exemplar or rule-based concept learning
tend to focus on the acquisition of one concept at a time.
They often underemphasize the fact that we learn many concepts
as part of large systems rather than as isolated individuals.
In such cases, the challenge of learning is not so much in
providing stand-alone definitions, but in describing the richly
structured relations between concepts. The natural numbers
are one of the first such abstract conceptual systems children
learn, serving as a serious case study in concept representation
and acquisition (Carey, 2009; Fuson, 1988; Gallistel
& Gelman, 2005). Even so, models of natural number learning
focused on single-concept acquisition have largely ignored
two challenges related to natural number’s status as a system
of concepts: 1) there is an unbounded set of exact number
concepts, each with distinct semantic content; and 2) people
can reason flexibly about any of these concepts (even fictitious
ones like eighteen-gazillion). To succeed, models must instead
learn the structure of the entire infinite set of number concepts,
focusing on how relationships between numbers support reference
and generalization. Here, we suggest that the latent predicate
network (LPN) – a probabilistic context-sensitive grammar
formalism – facilitates tractable learning and reasoning
for natural number concepts (Dechter, Rule, & Tenenbaum,
2015). We show how to express several key numerical relationships
in our framework, and how a Bayesian learning algorithm
for LPNs can model key phenomena observed in children
learning to count. These results suggest that LPNs might
serve as a computational mechanism by which children learn
abstract numerical knowledge from utterances about number