A logic of universal causation

Abstract

For many commonsense reasoning tasks associated with action domains, only a relatively simple kind of causal knowledge is required—knowledge of the conditions under which facts are caused. This note introduces a modal nonmonotonic logic for representing causal knowledge of this kind, relates it to other nonmonotonic formalisms, and shows that a variety of causal theories of action can be expressed in it, including the recently proposed causal action theories of Lin. The new logic extends the causal theories formalism of McCain and Turner, and provides a more adequate semantic account of it. A useful subset of the logic has a concise translation into classical propositional logic, and so can be used for automated planning and reasoning about action. A larger subset is closely related to logic programming under the answer set semantics, yielding another approach to automated reasoning.