Descriptor Revision: Belief Change Through Direct Choice

Cham, Switzerland: Springer Verlag (2017)
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Abstract

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 in response to different inputs. It also explores sentential revision and demonstrates how local and global operations of revision by a sentence can be derived as a special case of descriptor revision. Lastly, the book examines revocation, a generalization of contraction in which a specified sentence is removed in a process that may possibly also involve the addition of some new information to the belief set.

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ISBN(s)

9783319530604   9783319530611   3319530607   3319530623   3319850512

DOI

10.1007/978-3-319-53061-1
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Chapters

Sentential Revision

This is the first of three chapters in which the major traditional belief change operations, namely revision and contraction, are constructed as special cases of descriptor revision. In both its local and global forms, sentential revision $$$$ can be constructed with the simple formula $$K*p= K\circ... see more

Contraction

Contraction differs from revocation in satisfying the inclusion postulate $$$$ . In spite of the problems connected with that postulate, contraction represents an interesting idealization, namely that in which losses of beliefs are described with an exclusive focus on the beliefs that are lost and a... see more

Looking Back – and Ahead

This final chapter reconsiders the ten desiderata for the new framework that were presented in Chapter 3 and summarizes how they have been satisfied in the chapters that followed. The chapter concludes with a list of remaining problems and areas for future research.

Local Descriptor Revision

In this chapter the properties of descriptor revision, as defined in Chapter 4, are further explored. Several alternative selection mechanisms are presented, and the properties of the resulting operations are investigated. In one of these variants, the choice function is based on a relation on belie... see more

Inside the Black Box

This is the first of two chapters devoted to problems in the currently dominant model of belief change that justify the development of alternative frameworks for belief change. In this chapter the focus is on the selection mechanisms that are used to determine which previous beliefs are retained and... see more

Questionable Patterns of Change

This chapter explores some of the problematic properties of the standard operations of change. Both contraction and revision violate the highly plausible postulate of finite-based outcome. Contraction has further problems relating to the postulates of success, recovery, and inclusion, and revision h... see more

Putting the Building-Blocks Together

This is the first of four chapters that form the central part of the book, introducing and developing a new approach to belief change, descriptor revision. In this chapter, the new model is constructed from its basic components. We begin with a skeletal input-output model that contains no sentences ... see more

Revocation

The standard operation of contraction is assumed to satisfy the inclusion postulate , according to which nothing new is added to the belief set when a sentence is contracted. However, inclusion is not a particularly credible postulate. Although many belief changes have the purpose to give up a certa... see more

Global Descriptor Revision

In local change, the operation $$\circ $$ ∘ is specific for the original belief set K. Formally it is a function that takes us from a descriptor $$\Psi $$ Ψ to an element $$K\circ \Psi $$ K ∘ Ψ of the outcome set $$\mathbb {X}$$ X . It only represents changes that have K as their starting-point. In ... see more

The State of the Art

This chapter offers a brief presentation of major models of belief change that have been developed in previous research. It begins by introducing the basic features shared by most such models: Belief states are represented by logically closed sets of sentences, commonly called belief sets. Changes t... see more

Dynamic Descriptors

A dynamic descriptor carries information on how an agent’s beliefs are disposed to be changed in response to potential input. A particularly important class of dynamic descriptors are the Ramsey descriptors that have the form $$\Psi \Rightarrow \Xi $$ Ψ ⇒ Ξ where $$\Psi $$ Ψ and $$\Xi $$ Ξ are descr... see more

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Sven Ove Hansson
Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm

Citations of this work

A Basis for AGM Revision in Bayesian Probability Revision.Sven Ove Hansson - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 52 (6):1535-1559.
Iterated AGM Revision Based on Probability Revision.Sven Ove Hansson - 2023 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 32 (4):657-675.
Two Level Credibility-limited Revisions.Marco Garapa - forthcoming - Review of Symbolic Logic:1-21.
The logic of conditionals on outback trails.Johan van Benthem - 2023 - Logic Journal of the IGPL 31 (6):1135-1152.
Residual Contraction.Marco Garapa & Maurício D. L. Reis - 2020 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 29 (2):255-274.

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References found in this work

Counterfactuals.David Lewis - 1973 - Philosophy of Science 42 (3):341-344.

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