Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Coherence and Conservatism in the Dynamics of Belief

  • Published:
Erkenntnis Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In this paper I discuss the foundations of a formal theory of coherent and conservative belief change that is (a) suitable to be used as a method for constructing iterated changes of belief, (b) sensitive to the history of earlier belief changes, and (c) independent of any form of dispositional coherence. I review various ways to conceive the relationship between the beliefs actually held by an agent and her belief change strategies (that also deal with potential belief sets), show the problems they suffer from, and suggest that belief states should be represented by unary revision functions that take sequences of inputs. Three concepts of coherence implicit in current theories of belief change are distinguished: synchronic, diachronic and dispositional coherence. Diachronic coherence is essentially identified with what is known as conservatism in epistemology. The present paper elaborates on the philosophical motivation of the general framework; formal details and results are provided in a companion paper.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

REFERENCES

  • Alchourrón, C., P. Gärdenfors and D. Makinson: 1985, ‘On the Logic of Theory Change: Partial Meet Contraction Functions and Their Associated Revision Functions’, Journal of Symbolic Logic 50, 510-30.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alchourrón, C. and D. Makinson: 1985, ‘On the Logic of Theory Change: Safe Contraction’, Studia Logica 44, 405-22.

    Google Scholar 

  • Areces, C. and V. Becher: 1998, ‘Iterable AGM Functions’, to appear in M.-A. Williams and H. Rott (eds.), Frontiers of Belief Revision, Kluwer, Dordrecht.

  • Areces, C. and H. Rott: 1998, ‘Revising by Sequences’, Manuscript, ILLC, University of Amsterdam.

  • Arló-Costa, H.: 1999, ‘Belief Revision Conditionals: Basic Iterated Systems’, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 96, 3-28.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boutilier, C.: 1993, ‘Revision Sequences and Nested Conditionals’, in R. Bajcsy (ed.), IJCAI-93 — Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 519-25.

  • Boutilier, C.: 1996, ‘Iterated Revision and Minimal Change of Conditional Beliefs’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 25, 263-305.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cohen, L. J.: 1992, An Essay on Belief and Acceptance, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crocco, G. and A. Herzig: 1997, ‘The Ramsey Test as an Inference Rule’, in P. Weingartner, G. Schurz, and G. Dorn (eds.), The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy: Contributions of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, Vol. 5, Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, Kirchberg.

    Google Scholar 

  • Darwiche, A. and J. Pearl: 1994, ‘On the Logic of Iterated Belief Revision’, in R. Fagin (ed.), TARK'94 — Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge, Morgan Kaufmann, Pacific Grove, CA, pp. 5-23.

    Google Scholar 

  • Darwiche, A. and J. Pearl: 1997, ‘On the Logic of Iterated Belief Revision’, Artificial Intelligence 89, 1-29.

    Google Scholar 

  • Freund, M. and D. Lehmann: 1994, ‘Belief Revision and Rational Inference’, Technical Report TR-94-16, Institute of Computer Science, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

    Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, N. and J. Y. Halpern: 1996, ‘Belief Revision: A Critique’, in L. C. Aiello, J. Doyle and S. C. Shapiro (eds.), Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference (KR'96), Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, pp. 421-31. Extended and revised version to appear in the Journal of Logic, Language and Information.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gärdenfors, P.: 1982, ‘Imaging and Conditionalization’, Journal of Philosophy 79, 747-60.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gärdenfors, P.: 1984, ‘The Dynamics of Belief as a Basis for Logic’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 35, 1-10.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gärdenfors, P.: 1986, ‘Belief Revisions and the Ramsey Test for Conditionals’, Philosophical Review 95, 81-93.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gärdenfors, P.: 1988, Knowledge in Flux. Modeling the Dynamics of Epistemic States, Bradford Books, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gärdenfors, P. and D. Makinson: 1988, ‘Revisions of Knowledge Systems Using Epistemic Entrenchment’, in Moshe Vardi (ed.), TARK'88 — Proceedings of the Second Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge, Morgan Kaufmann, Los Altos, pp. 83-95.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gärdenfors, P. and H. Rott: 1995, ‘Belief Revision’, in D. M. Gabbay, C. J. Hogger, and J. A. Robinson (eds.), Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming Volume IV: Epistemic and Temporal Reasoning, Oxford University Press, pp. 35-132.

  • Gerbrandy, J. and W. Groeneveld: 1997, ‘Reasoning about Information Change’, Journal of Logic, Language and Information 6, 147-69.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grahne, G.: 1991, ‘Updates and Counterfactuals’, in J. Allen, R. Fikes and E. Sandewall (eds.), Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference, Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, pp. 269-76.

    Google Scholar 

  • Groenendijk, J. and M. Stokhof: 1991, ‘Dynamic Predicate Logic’, Linguistics and Philosophy 14, 39-101.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grove, A.: 1988, ‘Two Modellings for Theory Change’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 17, 157-70.

    Google Scholar 

  • Katsuno, H. and A. O. Mendelzon: 1991, ‘Prepositional Knowledge Base Revision and Minimal Change’, Artificial Intelligence 52, 263-94.

    Google Scholar 

  • Katsuno, H. and A. O. Mendelzon: 1992, ‘On the Difference between Updating a Knowledge Base and Revising It’, in P. Gärdenfors (ed.), Belief Revision, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 183-203.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lehmann, D.: 1995, ‘Belief Revision, Revised’, in IJCAI'95 — Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, pp. 1534-40.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lehrer, K.: 1990, Theory of Knowledge, Routledge, London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levi, I.: 1996, For the Sake of Argument, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, D.: 1976, ‘Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities’, Philosophical Review 85, 297-315.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lindström, S. and W. Rabinowicz: 1992, ‘Belief Revision, Epistemic Conditionals and the Ramsey Test’, Synthese 91, 195-237.

    Google Scholar 

  • Makinson, D.: 1985, ‘How to Give it Up: A survey of Some Formal Aspects of the Logic of Theory Change’, Synthese 62, 347-63.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nayak, A. C., N. Y. Foo, M. Pagnucco and A. Sattar: 1996, ‘Changing Conditional Beliefs Unconditionally’, in Y. Shoham (ed.), TARK'96 — Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge, pp. 119-35.

  • Rabinowicz, W.: 1995, ‘Stable Revision, or Is Preservation Worth Preserving?’, in A. Fuhrmann and H. Rott (eds.), Logic, Action and Information: Essays on Logic in Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence, de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 101-28.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rott, H.: 1989, ‘Conditionals and Theory Change: Revisions, Expansions, and Additions’, Synthese 81, 91-113.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rott, H.: 1991, ‘A Non-Monotonic Conditional Logic for Belief Revision I’, in André Fuhrmann and Michael Morreau (eds.), The Logic of Theory Change, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 465, Springer, Berlin, pp. 135-81.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rott, H.: 1992, ‘Preferential Belief Change Using Generalized Epistemic Entrenchment’, Journal of Logic, Language and Information 1, 45-78.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rott, H.: 1996, Making Up One's Mind: Foundations, Coherence, Nonmonotonicity, Habilitationsschrift, Department of Philosophy, University of Konstanz, October 1996. To appear under the title “Change, Choice and Inference” with Oxford University Press.

  • Rott, H.: 1997, ‘Drei Kohärenzbegriffe in der Dynamik kognitiver Systeme’, to appear in Julian Nida-Rümelin (ed.), Rationalität, Realismus, Revision, GAPS — Proceedings des dritten internationalen Kongresses der Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophic, de Gruyter, Berlin und New York.

  • Rott, H.: 1998a, ‘Coherence and Conservatism in the Dynamics of Belief. Part II: Iterated Belief Change without Dispositional Coherence’, Manuscript, Department of Philosophy and ILLC, University of Amsterdam.

  • Rott, H.: 1998b, ‘Two Dogmas of Belief Revision’, mimeographed in the Proceedings of the Third Conference on Logic and the Foundations of the Theory of Games and Decisions, International Centre for Economic Research, Torino.

  • Ryan, M. and P.-Y. Schobbens: 1997, ‘Counterfactuals and Updates as Inverse Modalities’, Journal of Logic, Language and Information 6, 123-46.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spohn, W.: 1988, ‘Ordinal Conditional Functions’, in W. L. Harper and B. Skyrms (eds.), Causation in Decision, Belief Change, and Statistics, Vol. II, Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 105-34.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stalnaker, R.: 1974, ‘Pragmatic Presuppositions’, in M. Munitz and P. Unger (eds.), Semantics and Philosophy, New York University Press, pp. 197-213.

  • Stalnaker, R.: 1984, Inquiry, Bradford Books, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Veltman, F.: 1996, ‘Defaults in Update Semantics’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 25, 221-61.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors
  1. Hans Rott
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Rott, H. Coherence and Conservatism in the Dynamics of Belief. Erkenntnis 50, 387–412 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005509518324

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005509518324

Keywords

Search

Navigation