Belief Revision

We argue that propositions about causes differ in meaning from those about enabling conditions: with a cause the effect is necessary, whereas with an enabler it is possible. But, the salient mental model is the same for both. We report an experiment that tested this difference in a study of belief revision. The results showed that causes and enabling conditions are revised differently. On consistent trials, most participants maintained their belief in a particular enabling condition whereas only half of the participants maintained their belief in a particular cause. On inconsistent trials, just over half of the participants switched their belief in a particular enabling condition whereas the majority of participants maintained their belief in a particular cause. We discuss the results with reference to theories of causality.

Abstract. We propose an abstract argumentation theory whose dynamics is captured by the application of belief revision concepts. The theory is deemed as abstract because both the underlying logic for arguments and argumentative semantics remain unspecified. Regarding our approach to argument theory change, we define some basic change operations along with their necessary theoretical elements towards the definition of a warrant-prioritized revision operation. This kind of revision expands the theory by an argument and then ...

The focus of this research is to demonstrate how probabilistic models may be used to pro-vide early warnings for bank failures. While prior research in the auditing literature has recognized the applicability of a Bayesian belief revision framework for many audit tasks, empirical ...

We argue that propositions about causes differ in meaning from those about enabling conditions: with a cause the effect is necessary, whereas with an enabler it is possible. But, the salient mental model is the same for both. We report an experiment that tested this difference in a study of belief revision. The results showed that causes and enabling conditions

We argue that propositions about causes differ in meaning from those about enabling conditions: with a cause the effect is necessary, whereas with an enabler it is possible. But, the salient mental model is the same for both. We report an experiment that tested this difference in a study of belief revision. The results showed that causes and enabling conditions are revised differently. On consistent trials, most participants maintained their belief in a particular enabling condition whereas only half of the participants maintained their belief in a particular cause. On inconsistent trials, just over half of the participants switched their belief in a particular enabling condition whereas the majority of participants maintained their belief in a particular cause. We discuss the results with reference to theories of causality.

We present a framework for incorporating perception-induced beliefs into the knowledge base of a rational agent. Normally, the agent accepts the propositional content of perception and other propositions that follow from it. Given the fallibility of perception, this may result in contradictory beliefs. Hence, we model high-level perception as belief revision. Adopting a classical AGM-style belief revision operator is problematic, since it implies that, as a result of perception, the agent will come to believe everything that follows from its new set of beliefs. We overcome this difficulty in two ways. First, we adopt a belief revision operator based on relevance logic, thus limiting the derived beliefs to those that relevantly follow from the new percept. Second, we focus belief revision on only a subset of the agent’s set of beliefs—those that we take to be within the agent’s current focus of attention.

In Hart and Kurz (1983), stability and formation of coalition structures has been investigated in a noncooperative framework in which the strategy of each player is the coalition he wishes to join. However, given a strategy profile, the coalition structure formed is not unequivocally ...

We propose a distributed architecture for belief revision-integration, where each element is conceived as a complex system able to exchange opinions with the others. Since nodes can be affected by some degree of incompetence, part of the information running through the network may be incorrect. Incorrect information may cause contradictions in the knowledge base of some nodes. To manage these contradictions, each node is equipped with a belief revision module which makes it able to discriminate among more or less credible information and more or less reliable information sources. Our aim is that of comparing on a simulation basis the performances and the characteristics of this distributed system vs. those of a centralised architecture. We report here the first results of our experiments.

We propose a distributed architecture for belief revision-integration, where each element is conceived as a complex system able to exchange opinions with the others. Since nodes can be affected by some degree of incompetence, part of the information running through the network may be incorrect. Incorrect information may cause contradictions in the knowledge base of some nodes. To manage these contradictions, each node is equipped with a belief revision module which makes it able to discriminate among more or less credible information and more or less reliable information sources. Our aim is that of comparing on a simulation basis the performances and the characteristics of this distributed system vs. those of a centralised architecture. We report here the first results of our experiments.

In this paper, logics are conceived as two-sorted first-order structures, and we argue that this broad definition encompasses a wide class of logics with theoretical interest as well as interest from the point of view of applications. The language, concepts and methods of model theory can thus be used to describe the relationship between logics through morphisms of structures called transfers. This leads to a formal framework for studying several properties of abstract logics and their attributes such as consequence operator, ...