  The Qualification Problem was raised in  McCarthy 1986,  where it was motivated chiefly by generalizations concerning the consequences of actions; McCarthy considers in some detail the generalization that turning the ignition key in an automobile will start the car. Much the same point, in fact, can be made about virtually any action, including stacking one block on another—the standard action that is used to illustrate the Situation Calculus. A circumscriptive approach to the Qualification Problem is presented in  Lifschitz 1987; this explicitly introduces the precondition relation between an action and its preconditions into the formalism, and circumscriptively minimizes preconditions, eliminating from preferred models any “unknown preconditions” that might render an action inefficacious.