To Preference via Entrenchment

We introduce a simple generalization of Gardenfors and Makinson's epistemic entrenchment called partial entrenchment. We show that preferential inference can be generated as the sceptical counterpart of an inference mechanism defined directly on partial entrenchment.Comment: 16 page

Reason Maintenance - State of the Art

This paper describes state of the art in reason maintenance with a focus on its future usage in the KiWi project. To give a bigger picture of the field, it also mentions closely related issues such as non-monotonic logic and paraconsistency. The paper is organized as follows: first, two motivating scenarios referring to semantic wikis are presented which are then used to introduce the different reason maintenance techniques

Numerical Representations of Acceptance

Accepting a proposition means that our confidence in this proposition is strictly greater than the confidence in its negation. This paper investigates the subclass of uncertainty measures, expressing confidence, that capture the idea of acceptance, what we call acceptance functions. Due to the monotonicity property of confidence measures, the acceptance of a proposition entails the acceptance of any of its logical consequences. In agreement with the idea that a belief set (in the sense of Gardenfors) must be closed under logical consequence, it is also required that the separate acceptance o two propositions entail the acceptance of their conjunction. Necessity (and possibility) measures agree with this view of acceptance while probability and belief functions generally do not. General properties of acceptance functions are estabilished. The motivation behind this work is the investigation of a setting for belief revision more general than the one proposed by Alchourron, Gardenfors and Makinson, in connection with the notion of conditioning.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI1995

AGM 25 years: twenty-five years of research in belief change

The 1985 paper by Carlos Alchourrón (1931–1996), Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson (AGM), “On the Logic of Theory Change: Partial Meet Contraction and Revision Functions” was the starting-point of a large and rapidly growing literature that employs formal models in the investigation of changes in belief states and databases. In this review, the first twenty five years of this development are summarized. The topics covered include equivalent characterizations of AGM operations, extended representations of the belief states, change operators not included in the original framework, iterated change, applications of the model, its connections with other formal frameworks, computatibility of AGM operations, and criticism of the model.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio