- Submit
-
Browse
- All Categories
- Metaphysics and Epistemology
- Value Theory
- Science, Logic, and Mathematics
- Science, Logic, and Mathematics
- Logic and Philosophy of Logic
- Philosophy of Biology
- Philosophy of Cognitive Science
- Philosophy of Computing and Information
- Philosophy of Mathematics
- Philosophy of Physical Science
- Philosophy of Social Science
- Philosophy of Probability
- General Philosophy of Science
- Philosophy of Science, Misc
- History of Western Philosophy
- Philosophical Traditions
- Philosophy, Misc
- Other Academic Areas
- More
Switch to: References
Citations of:
How to give it up: A survey of some formal aspects of the logic of theory change
Synthese 62 (3):347 - 363 (1985)
Add citations
You must login to add citations.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Our goal is to develop a syntactical apparatus for propositional logics in which the accepted and rejected propositions have the same status and obeying treated in the same way. The suggested approach is based on the ideas of Łukasiewicz used for the classical logic and in addition, it includes the use of multiple conclusion rules. More precisely, a consequence relation is defined on a set of statements of forms “proposition _A_ is accepted” and “proposition _A_ is rejected”, where _A_ is (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
The process [by which any individual settles into new opinions] is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain…. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we (...) |
|
|
Agents which perform inferences on the basis of unreliable information need an ability to revise their beliefs if they discover an inconsistency. Such a belief revision algorithm ideally should be rational, should respect any preference ordering over the agent’s beliefs (removing less preferred beliefs where possible) and should be fast. However, while standard approaches to rational belief revision for classical reasoners allow preferences to be taken into account, they typically have quite high complexity. In this paper, we consider belief revision (...) |
|
|
This paper is concerned with formal aspects of the logic of theory change, and in particular with the process of shrinking or contracting a theory to eliminate a proposition. It continues work in the area by the authors and Peter Gärdenfors. The paper defines a notion of safe contraction of a set of propositions, shows that it satisfies the Gärdenfors postulates for contraction and thus can be represented as a partial meet contraction, and studies its properties both in general and (...) |
|
|
In some recent papers, the authors and Peter Gärdenfors have defined and studied two different kinds of formal operation, conceived as possible representations of the intuitive process of contracting a theory to eliminate a proposition. These are partial meet contraction (including as limiting cases full meet contraction and maxichoice contraction) and safe contraction. It is known, via the representation theorem for the former, that every safe contraction operation over a theory is a partial meet contraction over that theory. The purpose (...) |
|
|
This book provides a critical examination of how the choice of what to believe is represented in the standard model of belief change. In particular the use of possible worlds and infinite remainders as objects of choice is critically examined. Descriptors are introduced as a versatile tool for expressing the success conditions of belief change, addressing both local and global descriptor revision. The book presents dynamic descriptors such as Ramsey descriptors that convey how an agent’s beliefs tend to be changed (...) |
|
|
ABSTRACT The major approaches to belief revision and non monotonic reasoning proposed in the literature differ along a number of dimensions, including whether they are ?syntax- based? or ?semantic-based?, ?foundational? or ?coherentist?, ?consistence-restoring? or ?inconsistency-tolerant?. Our contribution towards clarifying the connections between these various approaches is threefold: ?We show that the two main approaches to belief revision, the foundations and coherence theories, are mathematically equivalent, thus answering a question left open in [Gar90, Doy92], The distinction between syntax-based approaches to revision (...) |
|
|
AGM-theory, named after its founders Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors and David Makinson, is the leading contemporary paradigm in the theory of belief-revision. The theory is reformulated here so as to deal with the central relational notions 'J is a contraction of K with respect to A' and 'J is a revision of K with respect to A'. The new theory is based on a principal-case analysis of the domains of definition of the three main kinds of theory-change (expansion, contraction and (...) |
|
|
The Theory of theory change has contraction and revision as its central notions. Of these, contraction is the more fundamental. The best-known theory, due to Alchourrón, Gärdenfors, and Makinson, is based on a few central postulates. The most fundamental of these is the principle of recovery: if one contracts a theory with respect to a sentence, and then adds that sentence back again, one recovers the whole theory. Recovery is demonstrably false. This paper shows why, and investigates how one can (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This article proposes a formal analysis of a fundamental aspect of legal reasoning: dealing with normative conflicts. Firstly, examples are illustrated concerning the dynamics of legal systems, the application of rules and exceptions, and the semantic indeterminacy of legal sources. Then two approaches to cope with conflicting information are presented: the preferred theories of Brewka, and the belief change functions of Alchourrón, Gärdenfors, and Makinson. The relations between those approaches are closely examined, and some aspects of a model of reasoning (...) |
|
|
Inter-theoretical reduction has always been a major topic in the structuralist philosophy of science. This paper reviews criteria of adequacy which were put forward by Adams, Sneed, Stegmuller, Mayr, Pearce, Kamlah, and Mormann. The criteria are formalized in a simplified structuralist model, and the logical relations between them are investigated. It turns out that various parts of these criteria are incompatible. |
|
|
Richard Bradley has initiated a new debate, with Brian Hill and Jake Chandler as further participants, about the implications of a number of so-called triviality results surrounding the Ramsey test for conditionals. I comment on this debate and argue that ‘Inclusion’ and ‘Preservation’, which were originally introduced as postulates for the rational revision of factual beliefs, have little to recommend them in the first place when extended to languages containing conditionals. I question the philosophical method of postulation that was applied (...) |
|
|
We distinguish the set of explicit beliefs of a reasoner, his "belief base", from the beliefs that are merely implicit. Syntax-based belief change governed by the structure of the belief base and the ranking ("prioritization") of its elements is reconstructed with the help of an epistemic entrenchment relation in the style of Gärdenfors and Makinson. Though priorities are essentially different from entrenchments, distinguished relations of epistemic entrenchment may be obtained from prioritized belief bases by a number of different constructions. An (...) |
|
|
Deliberation about what to do in any context requires reasoning about what will or would happen in various alternative situations, including situations that the agent knows will never in fact be realized. In contexts that involve two or more agents who have to take account of each others' deliberation, the counterfactual reasoning may become quite complex. When I deliberate, I have to consider not only what the causal effects would be of alternative choices that I might make, but also what (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
This paper is concerned with the construction of a base contraction (revision) operation such that the theory contraction (revision) operation generated by it will be fully AGM-rational. It is shown that the theory contraction operation generated by Fuhrmann's minimal base contraction operation, even under quite strong restrictions, fails to satisfy the "supplementary postulates" of belief contraction. Finally Fuhrmann's construction is appropriately modified so as to yield the desired properties. The new construction may be described as involving a modification of safe (...) |
|
|
Describes and discusses the rather special behaviour of one of the postulates in the AGM account of theory change. |
|
|
ABSTRACT We consider evolution of knowledge bases caused by a sequence of basic steps of acquisition of a new information, either consistent or inconsistent with the original system. To make this process comply with the Principe of Minimal Change, a special evidence metric is introduced for measuring distance between states of knowledge. Then a novel semantics of knowledge bases is developed suggested by the heuristics of weighted maximally consistent subsets. The latter is efficiently applied to the processes of consistent and (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This paper discusses and rejects some objections raised by Chihara to the book Scientific Reasoning: the Bayesian Approach, by Howson and Urbach. Some of Chihara's objections are of independent interest because they reflect widespread misconceptions. One in particular, that the Bayesian theory presupposes logical omniscience, is widely regarded as being fatal to the entire Bayesian enterprise, It is argued here that this is no more true than the parallel charge that the theory of deductive logic is fatally comprised because it (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
Blockage revision is a version of descriptor revision, i.e. belief change in which a belief set K is changed with inputs whose success conditions are metalinguistic expressions containing the belief predicate \. This is a highly general framework that allows a single revision operator \ to take inputs corresponding to sentential revision ), contraction ) as well as more complex and composite operations. In blockage revision, such an operation is based on a relation \ of blockage among the set of (...) |
|
|
Using probability functions defined over a simple language as models of states of belief, my goal in this article has been to analyse contractions and revisions of beliefs. My first strategy was to formulate postulates for these processes. Close parallels between the postulates for contractions and the postulates for revisions have been established - the results in Section 5 show that contractions and revisions are interchangeable. As a second strategy, some suggestions for more or less explicit constructive definitions of the (...) |
|
|
The most controversial condition that the AGM theory of rational belief change places on belief contraction is the recovery condition. The condition is controversial because of a series of putative counterexamples due (separately) to I. Levi and S. O. Hansson. In this paper we show that the conflicts that Levi and Hansson arrange between AGM contraction and our intuitions about how to give up beliefs are merely apparent. We argue that these conflicts disappear once we attend more closely to the (...) |
|
|
The most controversial condition that the AGM theory of rational belief change places on belief contraction is the recovery condition. The condition is controversial because of a series of putative counterexamples due (separately) to I. Levi and S. O. Hansson. In this paper we show that the conflicts that Levi and Hansson arrange between AGM contraction and our intuitions about how to give up beliefs are merely apparent. We argue that these conflicts disappear once we attend more closely to the (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The AGM theory of belief contraction is extended tomultiple contraction, i.e. to contraction by a set of sentences rather than by a single sentence. There are two major variants: Inpackage contraction all the sentences must be removed from the belief set, whereas inchoice contraction it is sufficient that at least one of them is removed. Constructions of both types of multiple contraction are offered and axiomatically characterized. Neither package nor choice contraction can in general be reduced to contractions by single (...) |
|
|
The 1985 paper by Carlos Alchourrón (1931–1996), Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson (AGM), "On the Logic of Theory Change: Partial Meet Contraction and Revision Functions" was the starting-point of a large and rapidly growing literature that employs formal models in the investigation of changes in belief states and databases. In this review, the first twentyfive years of this development are summarized. The topics covered include equivalent characterizations of AGM operations, extended representations of the belief states, change operators not included in (...) |
|
|
The 1985 paper by Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson, “On the Logic of Theory Change: Partial Meet Contraction and Revision Functions” was the starting-point of a large and rapidly growing literature that employs formal models in the investigation of changes in belief states and databases. In this review, the first twenty-five years of this development are summarized. The topics covered include equivalent characterizations of AGM operations, extended representations of the belief states, change operators not included in the original (...) |
|
|
In this paper we investigate AGM belief contraction operators by using the tools of algebraic logic. We generalize the notion of contraction to arbitrary finitary propositional logics, and we show how to switch from a syntactic-based approach to a semantic one. This allows to build a solid bridge between the validity of AGM postulates in a propositional logic and specific algebraic properties of its intended algebraic counterpart. Such a connection deserves particular attention when we deal with maxichoice contractions, as studied (...) |
|
|
By Belief Revision it is understood a system that logically explains the rational process of changing beliefs by taking into account a new piece of information. The most influential approach in this field of study, the AGM system, proposed by Alchourrón, Gärdenfors, and Makinson, postulates rationality criteria for different types of belief change. In this paper I shall assess the relationship between those criteria and argue for an opposition between the principles of Information Economy and Consistency. Furthermore, I shall argue (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
This thesis investigates a sort of non-prioritized multiple revision, the operation of making up one's mind, and its generalization, the operation of choice revision. Making up one's mind about a sentence is a belief change that takes the agent to a belief state in which either the sentence or its negation is believed. In choice revision, the input information is represented by a set of sentences, and the agent should make a choice on which sentences to be accepted. Apart from (...) |
PhilPapers logo by Andrea Andrews and Meghan Driscoll.
This site uses cookies and Google Analytics (see our terms & conditions for details regarding the privacy implications). Use of this site is subject to terms & conditions.
All rights reserved by The PhilPapers Foundation
Server: philpapers-web-55b469568f-bl6rh uwo