67,909 research outputs found
Four Logics for Minimal Belief Revision
It is natural to think of belief revision as the interaction of belief and information over time. Thus branching-time temporal logic seems a natural setting for a theory of belief revision. We propose a logic based on three modal operators: a belief operator, an information operator and a next-time operator. Four logics of increasing strength are proposed. The first is a logic that captures the most basic notion of minimal belief revision. The second characterizes the qualitative content of Bayes' rule. The third provides an axiomatization of the AGM theory of belief revision and the fourth provides a characterization of the notion of plausibility ordering of the set of possible worlds.
Modeling Belief in Dynamic Systems, Part II: Revision and Update
The study of belief change has been an active area in philosophy and AI. In
recent years two special cases of belief change, belief revision and belief
update, have been studied in detail. In a companion paper (Friedman & Halpern,
1997), we introduce a new framework to model belief change. This framework
combines temporal and epistemic modalities with a notion of plausibility,
allowing us to examine the change of beliefs over time. In this paper, we show
how belief revision and belief update can be captured in our framework. This
allows us to compare the assumptions made by each method, and to better
understand the principles underlying them. In particular, it shows that Katsuno
and Mendelzon's notion of belief update (Katsuno & Mendelzon, 1991a) depends on
several strong assumptions that may limit its applicability in artificial
intelligence. Finally, our analysis allow us to identify a notion of minimal
change that underlies a broad range of belief change operations including
revision and update.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for other files accompanying this articl
Forgetting complex propositions
This paper uses possible-world semantics to model the changes that may occur
in an agent's knowledge as she loses information. This builds on previous work
in which the agent may forget the truth-value of an atomic proposition, to a
more general case where she may forget the truth-value of a propositional
formula. The generalization poses some challenges, since in order to forget
whether a complex proposition is the case, the agent must also lose
information about the propositional atoms that appear in it, and there is no
unambiguous way to go about this.
We resolve this situation by considering expressions of the form
, which quantify over all possible (but
minimal) ways of forgetting whether . Propositional atoms are modified
non-deterministically, although uniformly, in all possible worlds. We then
represent this within action model logic in order to give a sound and complete
axiomatization for a logic with knowledge and forgetting. Finally, some
variants are discussed, such as when an agent forgets (rather than
forgets whether ) and when the modification of atomic facts is done
non-uniformly throughout the model
Evidence and plausibility in neighborhood structures
The intuitive notion of evidence has both semantic and syntactic features. In
this paper, we develop an {\em evidence logic} for epistemic agents faced with
possibly contradictory evidence from different sources. The logic is based on a
neighborhood semantics, where a neighborhood indicates that the agent has
reason to believe that the true state of the world lies in . Further notions
of relative plausibility between worlds and beliefs based on the latter
ordering are then defined in terms of this evidence structure, yielding our
intended models for evidence-based beliefs. In addition, we also consider a
second more general flavor, where belief and plausibility are modeled using
additional primitive relations, and we prove a representation theorem showing
that each such general model is a -morphic image of an intended one. This
semantics invites a number of natural special cases, depending on how uniform
we make the evidence sets, and how coherent their total structure. We give a
structural study of the resulting `uniform' and `flat' models. Our main result
are sound and complete axiomatizations for the logics of all four major model
classes with respect to the modal language of evidence, belief and safe belief.
We conclude with an outlook toward logics for the dynamics of changing
evidence, and the resulting language extensions and connections with logics of
plausibility change
- …