Conditional logic of actions and causation

摘要

In this paper we present a new approach to reasoning about actions and causation which is based on a conditional logic. The conditional implication is interpreted as causal implication. This makes it possible to formalize in a uniform way causal dependencies between actions and their immediate and indirect effects. The proposed approach also provides a natural formalization of concurrent actions and of the dependency (and independency) relations between actions. The properties of causality are formalized as axioms of the conditional connectives and a non-monotonic (abductive) semantics is adopted for dealing with the frame problem.