Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We argue that causal reasoning is an essential part of intelligent human behavior, and that discussion of it cannot be divorced from discussion of temporal reasoning. We therefore set out to define causation in three stages. In the first, we present an ontology of time. We then outline a theory of "causal conditional", which allows one to reason about multiple possible courses of events. Finally, we define causation in terms of direct e=causation and causal origins