Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Reasoning about changes of existence in objects, such as steam appearing and water disappearing when boiling occurs, is something people do every day. Discovering methods to reason about such changes in existence is a central problem in Native Physiscs. This paper analyzes the problem by isolating an important case, called quantity-conditioned existence. and presnets a general method for solving it. An example generated by an implemented program is exhibited, and remaining open problems are discussed