Capturing Context in Causal Propagation

Conciseness and intuitive representation are two primary objectives motivating the work on seman-tics for various logics of action. In addition, a unifying semantic framework for different reason-ing approaches provides an ideal tool to compare these competing alternatives. It has been shown recently that a pure preferential semantics alone is not capable of providing such a unifying framework for a class of action theories dealing with causal-ity. On the other hand, variants of preferential se-mantics augmented by additional structures on the state space have been successfully used to char-acterise some influential approaches to causal rea-soning about action. The primary aim of this pa-per is to provide a general unifying semantics for Sandewall’s causal propagation semantics [Sande-wall, 1996] and McCain-Turner causal fixed-points approach [McCain and Turner, 1995].