Abstract

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 revision process (and indirectly also of the contraction process) were then presented. However, the results in Section 6 are less conclusive than in the earlier ones. This problem area still awaits further development