The myth of domain-independent persistence

Abstract

The frame problem can be reduced to the problem of inferring the non-existence of causes for change. This paper concerns how these non-existence inferences are made, and shows how many popular approaches lack generality because they rely on a domain-independent assumption of occurrence omniscience. Also, this paper shows how to represent and use appropriate domain-dependent knowledge in three successively more expressive versions, where the causal theories are deductive, non-monotonic, and statistical.