Choosing Your Beliefs

Abstract This paper presents and discusses a novel approach to indeterministic belief revision. An indeterministic belief revision operator assumes that, when an agent is confronted with a new piece of information, it can revise its belief sets in more than one way. We define a rational agent not only in terms of what it believes but also of what it desires and wants to achieve. Hence, we propose that the agent’s goals play a role in the choice of (possibly) one of the several available revision options. Properties of the new belief revision mechanism are also investigated. Keywords. Rational agents, indeterministic belief revision, qualitative decision theory. 1 Motivating example Suppose that you believe that:

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: DAGSTUHL
• Authors: Guido Boella, Célia da Costa Pereira, Gabriella Pigozzi, Andrea Tettamanzi, Leendert van der Torre
• Keywords: Belief Revision Operator, DAGSTUHL 2007, Indeterministic Belief Revision, Rational Agents, Software Engineering