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 e expressed in it, including the recently proposed causal action theories of Lin. The new logic extends the causal theories 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.