Title: An Epistemic First-Order Modal Logic for Actual Causality

Speaker: Daxin Liu (Nanjing University)

Time: Nov. 10th (Tuesday) 15:10 - 18:00

Location: Teaching Building No.2 (二教) 411

Language: Chinese

Abstract:

Perhaps the HP account is the most well-known formalism for actual causality, in which variables represent events and their causal relations are encoded in structural equation models. While elegant and appealing, it is essentially propositional, and efforts have been made to extend its expressiveness to incorporate complex features. In this talk, we introduce an epistemic first-order modal logic for reasoning about actual achievement causes. Building upon the epistemic situation calculus, a first-order modal logic of action and knowledge, we show that the notion of cause can be captured by yet another modal operator. We investigate the properties of causes and demonstrate how they interact with other modalities. Finally, we show how to use regression to reduce a class of causal reasoning problems to ordinary first-order reasoning.