A Unifying Semantics for Causal Ramifications

Abstract. A unifying semantic framework for different reasoning approaches provides an ideal tool to compare these competing alternatives. However, it has been shown recently that a pure preferential semantics alone is not capable of providing such a unifying framework. On the other hand, variants of preferen-tial semantics augmented by additional structures on the state space have been successfully used to characterise some influential approaches to reasoning about action and causality. The primary aim of this paper is to provide an augmented preferential semantics that is general enough to unify two prominent frameworks for reasoning about action and causality — Sandewall’s causal propagation se-mantics [4] and Thielscher’s causal relationships approach [5]. There are indica-tions that these and other different augmented preferential semantical approaches can by unified into a general framework, and provide the unified semantics that is lacking so far. Preferential style semantics have always been seen as a critical step on the way towards a concise solution to the frame and ramification problems. However, it ha