Causality in Theories of Action

Causation is a concept that plays an essential role in reasoning with commonsense. It is a property inherent to the dynamics of changing environments. Therefore, it should follow that causation should also play an essential role in the theories of action and change. However, in this article we postulate that causation is a form of abstraction. As a consequence of this view, one should not attempt to model causation as a primitive relationship between entities. Rather, causation should be viewed as an abstract relationship, which can be derived from observations (as a correlation) or derived from our knowledge of the structure of the world. In this article, we explore the modeling of two types of problems where causation appears to be necessary. We illustrate the problems with some simple examples found in the literature. We show that by decreasing the level of abstraction one can obtain the right results.