A new approach toward modeling causality in commonsense reasoning

Abstract

This article examines the issue of causality in commonsense reasoning and proposes a connectionist approach for modeling commonsense causal reasoning. Based on an analysis of the advantages and limitations of existing accounts, especially Shoham's logic, a generalized rule-based model FEL is proposed that can take into account the inexactness and the cumulative evidentiality of commonsense reasoning; this model corresponds naturally to a connectionist architecture. Detailed analyses are performed to show how the model handles commonsense causal reasoning. This work shows that a logic-based account of causality can be viewed as an (over)idealization of a more realistic model, which is simpler in form but deals with causality better. This work directly maps a (causal) rule-encoding scheme into a connectionist model; thus, it serves to link rule-based reasoning to connectionist models, notably with direct one-to-one correspondence between the basic structures of the two formalisms. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.