Belief Revision in the Context of Hume’s Treatise and Contemporary Psychology

This paper examines the emotional and social motivations of belief and belief correction. As beliefs motivate one’s actions, one must examine how one revises an erroneous or harmful belief and what methodology one can employ in order to best facilitate this revision, resulting in more conscientious action. This paper examines belief formation and revision in the context of David Hume’s 1739-1740 work A Treatise of Human Nature, with particular attention to not only Hume’s account of belief and belief revision, but also the interaction of passions, the mechanism of sympathy, reason, and probability judgments. It is hypothesized Hume’s theory of belief will be reflected in contemporary psychology and cognitive science, with individuals more likely to revise their beliefs based emotional and social factors and experiences proposed by Hume

Partial belief and flat-out belief

About the book: The idea that belief comes in degrees is based on the observation that we are more certain of some things than of others. Various theories try to give accounts of how measures of this confidence do or ought to behave, both as far as the internal mental consistency of the agent as well as his betting, or other, behaviour is concerned. This anthology is the first book to give a balanced overview of these theories. It also explicitly relates these debates to more traditional concerns of the philosophy of language and mind, and epistemic logic, namely how belief simpliciter does or ought to behave. The paradigmatic theory, probabilism (which holds that degrees of belief ought to satisfy the axioms of probability theory) is given most attention, but competing theories, such as Dempster-Shafer theory, possibility theory, and AGM belief revision theory are also considered. Each of these approaches is represented by one of its major proponents. The papers are specifically written to target advanced undergraduate students with a background in formal methods and beginning graduate students, but they will also serve as first point of reference for academics new to the area

Belief Revision in the Context of Hume’s Treatise and Contemporary Psychology

This paper examines the emotional and social motivations of belief and belief correction. As beliefs motivate one’s actions, one must examine how one revises an erroneous or harmful belief and what methodology one can employ in order to best facilitate this revision, resulting in more conscientious action. This paper examines belief formation and revision in the context of David Hume’s 1739-1740 work A Treatise of Human Nature, with particular attention to not only Hume’s account of belief and belief revision, but also the interaction of passions, the mechanism of sympathy, reason, and probability judgments. It is hypothesized Hume’s theory of belief will be reflected in contemporary psychology and cognitive science, with individuals more likely to revise their beliefs based emotional and social factors and experiences proposed by Hume

A Bayesian Framework for Modifications of Probabilistic Relational Data

The inherent uncertainty pervasive over the real world often forces business decisions to be made using uncertain data. The conventional relational model does not have the ability to handle uncertain data. In recent years, several approaches have been proposed in the literature for representing uncertain data by extending the relational model, primarily using probability theory. However, the aspect of database modification has been overlooked in these investigations. It is clear that any modification of existing probabilistic data, based on new information, amounts to the revision of one’s belief about real world objects. In this paper, we examine the aspect of belief revision and develop a generalized algorithm that can be used for modification of existing data in a probabilistic relational database

Belief revision from probability

In previous work ("Knowledge from Probability", TARK 2021) we develop a question-relative, probabilistic account of belief. On this account, what someone believes relative to a given question is (i) closed under entailment, (ii) sufficiently probable given their evidence, and (iii) sensitive to the relative probabilities of the answers to the question. Here we explore the implications of this account for the dynamics of belief. We show that the principles it validates are much weaker than those of orthodox theories of belief revision like AGM, but still stronger than those valid according to the popular Lockean theory of belief, which equates belief with high subjective probability. We then consider a restricted class of models, suitable for many but not all applications, and identify some further natural principles valid on this class. We conclude by arguing that the present framework compares favorably to the rival probabilistic accounts of belief developed by Leitgeb and by Lin and Kelly