scholarly journals Revision by Conditionals: From Hook to Arrow

Author(s):  
Jake Chandler ◽  
Richard Booth

The belief revision literature has largely focussed on the issue of how to revise one’s beliefs in the light of information regarding matters of fact. Here we turn to an important but comparatively neglected issue: How to model agents capable of acquiring information regarding which rules of inference (‘Ramsey Test conditionals’) they ought to use in reasoning about these facts. Our approach to this second question of so-called ‘conditional revision’ is distinctive insofar as it abstracts from the controversial details of how the address the first. We introduce a ‘plug and play’ method for uniquely extending any iterated belief revision operator to the conditional case. The flexibility of our approach is achieved by having the result of a conditional revision by a Ramsey Test conditional (‘arrow’) determined by that of a plain revision by its corresponding material conditional (‘hook’). It is shown to satisfy a number of new constraints that are of independent interest.

Author(s):  
Meliha Sezgin ◽  
Gabriele Kern-Isberner ◽  
Christoph Beierle

AbstractProbability kinematics is a leading paradigm in probabilistic belief change. It is based on the idea that conditional beliefs should be independent from changes of their antecedents’ probabilities. In this paper, we propose a re-interpretation of this paradigm for Spohn’s ranking functions which we call Generalized Ranking Kinematics as a new principle for iterated belief revision of ranking functions by sets of conditional beliefs with respect to their specific subcontext. By taking into account semantical independencies, we can reduce the complexity of the revision task to local contexts. We show that global belief revision can be set up from revisions on the local contexts via a merging operator. Furthermore, we formalize a variant of the Ramsey-Test based on the idea of local contexts which connects conditional and propositional revision in a straightforward way. We extend the belief change methodology of c-revisions to strategic c-revisions which will serve as a proof of concept.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Heyninck ◽  
Gabriele Kern-Isberner ◽  
Tjitze Rienstra ◽  
Kenneth Skiba ◽  
Matthias Thimm

For propositional beliefs, there are well-established connections between belief revision, defeasible conditionals and nonmonotonic inference. In argumentative contexts, such connections have not yet been investigated. On the one hand, the exact relationship between formal argumentation and nonmonotonic inference relations is a research topic that keeps on eluding researchers despite recently intensified efforts, whereas argumentative revision has been studied in numerous works during recent years. In this paper, we show that similar relationships between belief revision, defeasible conditionals and nonmonotonic inference hold in argumentative contexts as well. We first define revision operators for abstract dialectical frameworks, and use such revision operators to define dynamic conditionals by means of the Ramsey test. We show that such conditionals can be equivalently defined using a total preorder over three-valued interpretations, and study the inferential behaviour of the resulting conditional inference relations.


1997 ◽  
Vol 89 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adnan Darwiche ◽  
Judea Pearl

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 598-612 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thanuka L. Wickramarathne ◽  
Kamal Premaratne ◽  
Manohar N. Murthi ◽  
Nitesh V. Chawla

2006 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 127-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Booth ◽  
T. Meyer

As partial justification of their framework for iterated belief revision Darwiche and Pearl convincingly argued against Boutilier's natural revision and provided a prototypical revision operator that fits into their scheme. We show that the Darwiche-Pearl arguments lead naturally to the acceptance of a smaller class of operators which we refer to as admissible. Admissible revision ensures that the penultimate input is not ignored completely, thereby eliminating natural revision, but includes the Darwiche-Pearl operator, Nayak's lexicographic revision operator, and a newly introduced operator called restrained revision. We demonstrate that restrained revision is the most conservative of admissible revision operators, effecting as few changes as possible, while lexicographic revision is the least conservative, and point out that restrained revision can also be viewed as a composite operator, consisting of natural revision preceded by an application of a "backwards revision" operator previously studied by Papini. Finally, we propose the establishment of a principled approach for choosing an appropriate revision operator in different contexts and discuss future work.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
HANS ROTT

Abstract This article explores conditionals expressing that the antecedent makes a difference for the consequent. A ‘relevantised’ version of the Ramsey Test for conditionals is employed in the context of the classical theory of belief revision. The idea of this test is that the antecedent is relevant to the consequent in the following sense: a conditional is accepted just in case (i) the consequent is accepted if the belief state is revised by the antecedent and (ii) the consequent fails to be accepted if the belief state is revised by the antecedent’s negation. The connective thus defined violates almost all of the traditional principles of conditional logic, but it obeys an interesting logic of its own. The article also gives the logic of an alternative version, the ‘Dependent Ramsey Test,’ according to which a conditional is accepted just in case (i) the consequent is accepted if the belief state is revised by the antecedent and (ii) the consequent is rejected (e.g., its negation is accepted) if the belief state is revised by the antecedent’s negation. This conditional is closely related to David Lewis’s counterfactual analysis of causation.


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