Ramification and Causality

The ramification problem in the context of commonsense reasoning about actions and change names the challenge to accommodate actions whose execution causes indirect effects. Not being part of the respective action specification, such effects are consequences of general laws describing dependencies between components of the world description. We present a general approach to this problem which incorporates causality, formalized by directed relations between two single effects stating that, under specific circumstances, the occurrence of the first causes the second. Moreover, necessity of exploiting causal information in this way or a similar is argued by elaborating the limitations of common paradigms employed to handle ramifications, namely, the principle of categorization and the policy of minimal change. Our abstract solution is exemplarily integrated into a specific calculus based on the logic programming paradigm.

ICSI Technical Report TR-96-003

Technical Report