Default Logic in a Coherent Setting

In this talk - based on the results of a forthcoming paper (Coletti, Scozzafava and Vantaggi 2002), presented also by one of us at the Conference on "Non Classical Logic, Approximate Reasoning and Soft-Computing" (Anacapri, Italy, 2001) - we discuss the problem of representing default rules by means of a suitable coherent conditional probability, defined on a family of conditional events. An event is singled-out (in our approach) by a proposition, that is a statement that can be either true or false; a conditional event is consequently defined by means of two propositions and is a 3-valued entity, the third value being (in this context) a conditional probability

Belief Revision with Uncertain Inputs in the Possibilistic Setting

This paper discusses belief revision under uncertain inputs in the framework of possibility theory. Revision can be based on two possible definitions of the conditioning operation, one based on min operator which requires a purely ordinal scale only, and another based on product, for which a richer structure is needed, and which is a particular case of Dempster's rule of conditioning. Besides, revision under uncertain inputs can be understood in two different ways depending on whether the input is viewed, or not, as a constraint to enforce. Moreover, it is shown that M.A. Williams' transmutations, originally defined in the setting of Spohn's functions, can be captured in this framework, as well as Boutilier's natural revision.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI1996

Updating Choquet Beliefs.

We apply Pires’s coherence property between unconditional and conditional preferences that admit a CEU representation. In conjunction with consequentialism (only those outcomes on states which are still possible can matter for conditional preference) this implies that the conditional preference may be obtained from the unconditional preference by taking the Full Bayesian Update of the capacity. Attitudes towards sequential versus simultaneous resolution of uncertainty for a simple bet are analyzed. We show that for a class of recursive CEU preferences which exhibit both optimism and pessimism, a 'good-news' signal is preferred to no signal which is preferred to a 'bad-news' signal.updating ambiguous beliefs, Full Bayesian Updating, Choquet Expected Utility, optimism, pessimism, recursive preferences.