Consider some facts: water contains hydrogen, my colleague’s cat is alive, diamond is harder than granite, I prefer oatmeal to brussels sprouts, Beijing has over 14 million inhabitants, interest rates are low. These chemical, biological, geological, psychological, sociological, and economic facts all appear to rest on further facts. Facts involving cities, e.g., the fact that Beijing has over 1...

This paper is a fresh attempt to articulate the role of a theory of truthmakers. We argue that truthmaker theory constitutes a cornerstone of good methodology in metaphysics, but that a conflation of truthmaker theory with the theory of truth has been responsible for certain excesses associated with truthmaker-based approaches in the recent literature. We show that truthmaker theory retains its...

In research areas such as decision support systems, one of the crucial features is the ability to automatically explain decisions. However, this ability does not typically play a large role in computer games. Here, I suggest that this situation will change: research on the automatic generation of explanations will have real import for many types of computer games. I discuss four possible ways t...

When engaging in counterfactual thought, people must imagine changes to the actual state of the world. In this study, we investigated how people reason about counterfactual scenarios by asking participants to make counterfactual inferences about a series of causal devices (i.e., answer questions such as If component X had not operated [had failed], would components Y, Z, and W have operated?) a...

Emotions can be explained as specialized states, shaped by natural selection, that increase fitness in specific situations. The physiological, psychological, and behavioral characteristics of a specific emotion can be analyzed as possible design features that increase the ability to cope with the threats and opportunities present in the corresponding situation. This approach to understanding th...