On the logic of event-causation. Jaśkowski-style systems of causal logic (Q1338482)

This is a paper on causal logic, a subject which has emerged from a certain Polish tradition in nonclassical logic. The author defines a framework for constructing formal counterparts of causal relations between events. A nonempty range of ``precausal'' connectives eligible for further refinement in order to formalize causality between events in a given domain is demarcated by means of collections of axiom schemata \(L^ +\) and \(L^ -\). These schemata describe the interplay between causal and classical connectives. Every schema from \(L^ +\) must be validated by any precausal connective \(\to_ k\), whereas every item from \(L^ -\) must be a schema of a non-theorem in the logic extended by \(\to_ k\). The identification of members of the class of precausal connectives is dealt with by considering a chain of increasingly complex so-called Jaśkowski systems. The latter are rather ingenious but involve logical systems meant to formalize the idea of dependent sentential variables as introduced by Heyting. The paper provides additional insight into these systems by representing them as multi-modal logics. Moreover, the construction used in the representation applies to any regular multi-modal logic with reflexive accessibility relations and thereby makes available many examples of precausal connectives.