Actual Causality in Contextual Abduction

Causality is an important part of science and our daily life, e.g., to determine responsibility in legal arguments and causal explanations for observations. This paper presents how actual causality can be modeled by contextual abduction in logic programming. We refer to causal model of Halpern and Pearl, and translate it into a causal abductive framework. Using this framework and by treating the given actual world as the context of abduction, actual causes are computed by abducing explanations consistent to that context. We provide a procedure for computing actual causes by means of contextual abduction in Prolog and experiment with examples from the literature. The result coincides with that computed by the clausal causal theory of Bochman.