Ramification and causality

In formal systems for reasoning about actions, the ramification problem denotes the problem of handling indirect effects. These effects are not explicitly represented in action specifications but follow from general laws describing dependencies among components of the world state. An adequate treatment of indirect effects requires a suitably weakened version of the general law of persistence. It also requires a method to avoid unintuitive changes suggested by the aforementioned dependency laws. We propose a solution to the ramification problem that uses directed relations between two single effects, stating the circumstances under which the occurrence of the first causes the second. We argue for the necessity of an approach based on causality by elaborating the limitations of common paradigms employed to handle ramifications—the principle of categorization and the policy of minimal change. Our abstract solution is realized on the basis of a particular action calculus, namely, the fluent calculus.

Authors

• Michael Thielscher

Keywords

• Temporal reasoning
• Reasoning about actions
• Ramification problem
• Causality
• Fluent calculus