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Belief Revision and Relevance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Peter Gärdenfors
Peter Gärdenfors*
Affiliation:
University of Lund
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Extract

The theory of belief revision deals with models of states of belief and transitions between states of belief. The goal of the theory is to describe what should happen when you update a state of belief with new information. In the most interesting case, the new information is inconsistent with what you believe. This means that some of the old beliefs have to be deleted if one wants to remain within a consistent state of belief. A guiding idea is that the change should be minimal so that as few of the old beliefs as possible are given up.

A central problem for the theory of belief revision is what is meant by a minimal change of a state of belief. The solution to this problem depends to a large extent on the model of a state of belief that is adopted.

Type
Part VIII. Statistical Inference and Theory Change
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 349 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1991

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Footnotes

1

Research for this article has been supported by the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. I wish to thank Didier Dubois, David Miller, Henri Prade, Teddy Seidenfeld, and Wolfgang Spohn for helpful comments.

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