Time in a causal theory

Discusses the temporal aspects of a causal theory based on an "interventionist" conception of causality, i.e. a preference to select causes among a set of actions which an agent has the ability to perform or not to perform (free will). Casting causal reasoning in this framework leads to explore the problem of reasoning about actions, generally considered as a nonmonotonic temporal reasoning. Most works on nonmonotonic temporal reasoning have used simple temporal ontologies, such as situation calculus, or temporal logic with discrete time. The theory presented in this paper also has a simple temporal ontology, based on "time points" organized on branching "time lines", with the possibility of modelling continuous evolutions of the world for various futures (prediction) or pasts (diagnosis).