Abstract

When drawing conclusions about narratives, minimizing---to a reasonable extent---the occurrence of events is crucial. We argue that unguided minimization is insufficient in case events are causally connected, for it easily fails to distinguish unmotivated event occurrences from those that have a cause. Two solutions are offered, the first of which has the advantage of being straightforwardly realized but on the other hand has a restricted range of applicability. Our second solution overcomes these restrictions but requires two uncommon and novel features. First, event occurrences are identified as fluents, which allows to adapt a recent causality-oriented solution to the Ramification Problem so that if an event is caused by another event then the former is obtained as indirect effect of what caused the latter. Second, volitional actions and natural events which have no cause inside the reasoning context, are furnished with a special cause, namely, the reaching of the time-point at whic...

Citations