Rational Belief Revision

Theories of rational belief revision recently proposed by Alchourron, Gardenfors, Makinson, and Nebel illuminate many important issues but impose unnecessarily strong standards for correct revisions and make strong assumptions about what information is available to guide revisions. We reconstruct these theories according to an economic standard of rationality in which preferences are used to select among alternative possible revisions. By permitting multiple partial speci cations of preferences in ways closely related to preference-based nonmonotonic logics, the reconstructed theory employs information closer to that available in practice and o ers more exible ways of selecting revisions. We formally compare this new conception of rational belief revision with the original theories, adapt results about universaldefault theories to prove that there is unlikely to be any universal method of rational belief revision, and examine formally how different limitations on rationality a ect bel...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1991
• Where: KR
• Authors: Jon Doyle
• Keywords: Alternative Possible Revisions, Automated Reasoning, Correct Revisions, KR 1991, Rational Belief Revision