A Critical Exposition of Isaac Levi's Epistemology

The branch of philosophical logic which has become known as “belief change” has, in the course of its development, become alienated from its epistemological origins. However, as formal criteria do not suffice to defend a principled choice between competing systems for belief change, we do need to take their epistemological embedding into account. Here, on the basis of a detailed examination of Isaac Levi's epistemology, we argue for a new direction of belief change research and propose to construct systems for belief change that can do without, but do not rule out, selection functions, in order to enable an *empirical* assessment of the relative merits of competing belief change systems.