Causation, Explanation and Persistence

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 S 0 that works for logical theories in which causal knowledge is represented explicitly, and version I 0 that works for logical theories in which this is not the case. We show that various restrictions of S 0 are equivalent to various existing approaches that are explicitly based on causation. For most other existing causation-based approaches, we give examples of reasoning domains that S 0 handles better than they do. In a similar manner we show that two of the most wellknown non-causal approaches, namely Baker's account and `chronological minimization with filter preferential entailment', can be reinterpreted as approximations of I 0 . We thus provide a reinterpretation in terms of causal network theory of much of the work done in ..