A consistency-based approach for belief change Original Research Article

This paper presents a general, consistency-based framework for expressing belief change. The framework has good formal properties while being well-suited for implementation. For belief revision, informally, in revising a knowledge base K by a sentence α, we begin with α and include as much of K as consistently possible. This is done by expressing K and α in disjoint languages, asserting that the languages agree on the truth values of corresponding atoms wherever consistently possible, and then re-expressing the result in the original language of K. There may be more than one way in which the languages of K and α can be so correlated: in choice revision, one such “extension” represents the revised state; alternately (skeptical) revision consists of the intersection of all such extensions. Contraction is similarly defined although, interestingly, it is not interdefinable with revision.