Causality, Indirect Effects and Triggers

Causality plays an essential role in reasoning about actions, and much of the research on the area deals with the problem of formalizing causality. In this article we pursue the idea that causality can be understood as an abstraction, and that one can write theories in which causality can be left implicit in the formalization of dynamic worlds. In particular, we identify one form of causality, which we call triggered causality, and illustrate it with a simple standard example taken from the literature on causation. Later, we relate our approach to causality to the one proposed by Lin in his recent research. We establish the proposition that, for a restricted class of theories based on explicit causation, it is possible to find a translation of a causal theory into a theory with embedded causa-