Abstract

An account of belief revision is developed which takes account of the cognitive capabilities of human epistemic agents. We begin with an agent's commitment sets, i.e., sets comprised of those sentences which she is both epistemically committed to accepting, and which she should be able to cognitively grasp in a manner sufficient for praiseworthy belief revision. ;Whether an agent is epistemically committed to accepting a sentence depends on those epistemic standards of her epistemic communities which apply in her situation. These standards determine which information is to count as intersubjectively evident in her situation. She must take account of this information if she is to be epistemically responsible. ;The extent to which it should motivate revision of her commitment sets depends on several factors. First, it depends on the extent to which it coheres with her commitment sets. A sentence coheres with a set if members of that set can serve as premisses in an argument which enables her to infer that sentence on the basis of those premisses, and thus enable her to improve the explanatory and inferential integration of those sets. ;Second, it depends on the extent to which members of the commitment set with which it coheres are entrenched in her conception of the world. Entrenchment is understood in terms of the role which the sentences play in the maintenance and improvement of her conception of the world. ;A sentence's contribution to our conception of the world is determined by considering the contextual effects of that sentence. Contextual effects are those sentences which can be obtained by means of elimination rules when a sentence is integrated with a commitment set, which could not be obtained from the commitment set alone, or the sentence alone. An elimination rule analyzes or explicates the content of sentences to which it is applied. ;After addressing various objections to the positions outlined above, we end up with an account of the contribution which the acceptance of a sentence would make to maintaining and improving our conception of the world