Causation and nonmonotonic temporal reasoning

Abstract

We introduce a new approach to reasoning about action and change using nonmonotonic logic. The approach is arrived at by applying Pearl's theory of causal networks to logical formalizations of temporal reasoning domains. It comes in two versions: version S₀ that works for logical theories in which causal knowledge is represented explicitly, and version I₀ that works for logical theories in which this is not the case. It turns out that various restrictions of So are equivalent to various existing approaches that are explicitly based on causation. Similarly, two of the most well-known non-causal approaches, namely Baker's account and ‘chronological minimization with filter preferential entailment’, can be reinterpreted as approximations of Io. We thus provide a reinterpretation in terms of causal network theory of much of the work done in nonmonotonic temporal reasoning.