1. Causal knowledge is an indispensable element in science. Causal assertions are embedded in both the results and the procedures of scientific investigation. 2. It is therefore worthwhile to investigate the meaning of causal statements and the ways in which we can arrive at causal knowledge.

It seems to me that the ingredients of most theories both in Artificial Intelligence and in Psychology have been on the whole too minute, local, and unstructured to account–either practically or phenomenologically–for the effectiveness of common-sense thought. The "chunks" of reasoning, language, memory, and "perception" ought to be larger and more structured; their factual and procedural contents must be more intimately connected in order to explain the apparent power and speed of mental activities.

This paper extends earlier work by its authors on formal aspects of the processes of contracting a theory to eliminate a proposition and revising a theory to introduce a proposition. In the course of the earlier work, Gardenfors developed general postulates of a more or less equational nature for such processes, whilst Alchourron and Makinson studied the particular case of contraction functions that are maximal, in the sense of yielding a maximal subset of the theory (or alternatively, of one of (...) its axiomatic bases), that fails to imply the proposition being eliminated. In the present paper, the authors study a broader class, including contraction functions that may be less than maximal. Specifically, they investigate "partial meet contraction functions", which are defined to yield the intersection of some nonempty family of maximal subsets of the theory that fail to imply the proposition being eliminated. Basic properties of these functions are established: it is shown in particular that they satisfy the Gardenfors postulates, and moreover that they are sufficiently general to provide a representation theorem for those postulates. Some special classes of partial meet contraction functions, notably those that are "relational" and "transitively relational", are studied in detail, and their connections with certain "supplementary postulates" of Gardenfors investigated, with a further representation theorem established. (shrink)

This article rebuts Ramsey's earlier theory, in 'Universals of Law and of Fact', of how laws of nature differ from other true generalisations. It argues that our laws are rules we use in judging 'if I meet an F I shall regard it as a G'. This temporal asymmetry is derived from that of cause and effect and used to distinguish what's past as what we can know about without knowing our present intentions.

An extended review of what is known about the formal behaviour of nonmonotonic inference operations, including those generated by the principal systems in the artificial intelligence literature. Directed towards computer scientists and others with some background in logic.

A sentence A is epistemically less entrenched in a belief state K than a sentence B if and only if a person in belief state K who is forced to give up either A or B will give up A and hold on to B. This is the fundamental idea of epistemic entrenchment as introduced by Gärdenfors (1988) and elaborated by Gärdenfors and Makinson (1988). Another distinguishing feature of relations of epistemic entrenchment is that they permit particularly simple and elegant (...) construction recipes for minimal changes of belief states. These relations, however, are required to satisfy rather demanding conditions. In the present paper we liberalize the concept of epistemic entrenchment by removing connectivity, minimality and maximality conditions. Correspondingly, we achieve a liberalization of the concept of rational belief change that does no longer presuppose the postulates of success and rational monotony. We show that the central results of Gärdenfors and Makinson are preserved in our more flexible setting. Moreover, the generalized concept of epistemic entrenchment turns out to be applicable also to relational and iterated belief changes. (shrink)