How to Do Things with Worlds: on Formalizing Actions and Plans

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Abstract
The paper begins with a critique of the Ginsberg/Smith approach to reasoning about action which is based on the notion of maximal consistent subsets of world descriptions. There are some deep difficulties with this approach due to a misconception of what is possible and what is not. Incomplete information about the actual state of the world may lead to counterintuitive conclusions about what is true after an action is performed. These problems were first discussed by Winslett, who presents an alternative formalization based on possible models. Her formalization solves problems with incomplete descriptions of the world. However, related problems caused by using disjunctive postconditions to model ambiguous actions remain unsolved. Moreover, Winslett does not take the effects of causality into account when determining the closeness of worlds. We present a novel formalization of actions that avoids these problems.

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