I'm not sure I buy the whole 'subverbal' thing -- it seems to me that misleading phrasing is a big part of the problem. If asked to find the "rule" which "governs" a sequence of three numbers, I'd (incorrectly ...) assume that the questioner was thinking of some simple rule that can be used to generate all of the valid sequences. Given the examples, I'd guess it was something like 'x x+2 x+4' or '2x 2(x+1) 2(x+2).' Now, after I started typing this I realized that you could map all ascending 3 integer sequences to the whole numbers, s... (read more)
I'm not sure I buy the whole 'subverbal' thing -- it seems to me that misleading phrasing is a big part of the problem. If asked to find the "rule" which "governs" a sequence of three numbers, I'd (incorrectly ...) assume that the questioner was thinking of some simple rule that can be used to generate all of the valid sequences. Given the examples, I'd guess it was something like 'x x+2 x+4' or '2x 2(x+1) 2(x+2).' Now, after I started typing this I realized that you could map all ascending 3 integer sequences to the whole numbers, s... (read more)