Conditionals are most important objects in knowledge representation, commonsense reasoning and belief revision. Due to their non-classical nature, however, they are not easily dealt with. This paper presents a new approach to conditionals, which is apt to capture their dynamic power particularly well. We show how this approach can be applied to represent conditional knowledge inductively, and to guide revisions of epistemic states by sets of beliefs. In particular, we generalize system-Z* as an appropriate counterpart to maximum entropy-representations in a (...) semi-quantitative setting, and provide a theoretical justification to make its basic ideas usable also for belief revision. (shrink)

In the context of a general framework for belief dynamics which interprets revision as doxastic constraint satisfaction, we discuss a proposal for revising quasi-probabilistic belief measures with finite sets of graded conditionals. The belief states are ranking measures with divisible values (generalizing Spohn’s epistemology), and the conditionals are interpreted as ranking constraints. The approach is inspired by the minimal information paradigm and based on the principle-guided canonical construction of a ranking model of the input conditionals. This is achieved by extending (...) techniques known from conditional default reasoning. We give an overview of how it handles different principles for conditional and parallel revision and compare it with similar accounts. (shrink)

Evidential reasoning is hard, and errors can lead to miscarriages of justice with serious consequences. Analytic methods for the correct handling of evidence come in different styles, typically focusing on one of three tools: arguments, scenarios or probabilities. Recent research used Bayesian networks for connecting arguments, scenarios, and probabilities. Well-known issues with Bayesian networks were encountered: More numbers are needed than are available, and there is a risk of misinterpretation of the graph underlying the Bayesian network, for instance as a (...) causal model. The formalism presented here models presumptive arguments about coherent hypotheses that are compared in terms of their strength. No choice is needed between qualitative or quantitative analytic styles, since the formalism can be interpreted with and without numbers. The formalism is applied to key concepts in argumentative, scenario and probabilistic analyses of evidential reasoning, and is illustrated with a fictional crime investigation example based on Alfred Hitchcock’s film ‘To Catch A Thief’. (shrink)

We discuss O&C's probabilistic approach from a probability logical point of view. Specifically, we comment on subjective probability, the indispensability of logic, the Ramsey test, the consequence relation, human nonmonotonic reasoning, intervals, generalized quantifiers, and rational analysis.

This paper first provides a brief survey of a possibilistic handling of default rules. A set of default rules of the form, "generally, from α deduce β", is viewed as the family of possibility distributions satisfying constraints expressing that the situation where α and β is true has a greater plausibility than the one where α and ⇁β is true. When considering only the subset of linear possibility distributions, the well-known System P of postulates proposed by Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor, (...) has been obtained. We also present two rational extensions: one based on the minimum specificity principle and the other is based on the lexicographic ordering. The second part of the paper presents an empirical study of three desirable properties for a consequence relation that capture default reasoning: Rationality, Property Inheritance and Ambiguity Preservation. An experiment is conducted to investigate 13 patterns of inference for the test of these properties. Our experimental apparatus confirms previous results on the relevance of System P, and enforces the psychological relevance of the studied properties. (shrink)

We present new probabilistic generalizations of Pearl’s entailment in System Z and Lehmann’s lexicographic entailment, called Zλ- and lexλ-entailment, which are parameterized through a value λ ∈ [0,1] that describes the strength of the inheritance of purely probabilistic knowledge. In the special cases of λ = 0 and λ = 1, the notions of Zλ- and lexλ-entailment coincide with probabilistic generalizations of Pearl’s entailment in System Z and Lehmann’s lexicographic entailment that have been recently introduced by the author. We show (...) that the notions of Zλ- and lexλ-entailment have similar properties as their classical counterparts. In particular, they both satisfy the rationality postulates of System P and the property of Rational Monotonicity. Moreover, Zλ-entailment is weaker than lexλ-entailment, and both Zλ- and lexλ-entailment are proper generalizations of their classical counterparts. (shrink)

In this paper we propose a semantic analysis of Lewis' counterfactuals. By exploiting the structural properties of the recently introduced boolean algebras of conditionals, we show that counterfactuals can be expressed as formal combinations of a conditional object and a normal necessity modal operator. Specifically, we introduce a class of algebras that serve as modal expansions of boolean algebras of conditionals, together with their dual relational structures. Moreover, we show that Lewis' semantics based on sphere models can be reconstructed in (...) this framework. As a consequence, we establish the soundness and completeness of a slightly stronger variant of Lewis' logic for counterfactuals with respect to our algebraic models. In the second part of the paper, we present a novel approach to the probability of counterfactuals showing that it aligns with the uncertainty degree assigned by a belief function, as per Dempster-Shafer theory, to its associated conditional formula. Furthermore, we characterize the probability of a counterfactual in terms of Gärdenfors' imaging rule for the probabilistic update. (shrink)