Conservative Belief Revision

A standard intuition underlying traditional accounts of belief change is the principle of minimal change. In this paper we introduce a novel account of belief change in which the agent's belief state is modified minimally to incorporate exactly the new information. Thus a revision by p V q will result in a new belief state in which p V q is believed, but a stronger proposition (such as p A q) is not, regardless of the initial form of the belief state. A reasoning entity will need to maintain its stock of beliefs in the face of new information. Such belief change is not arbitrary; rather belief change is generally taken to be guided by various rationality criteria. One of the most widely advocated rationality criterion is the principle of minimal change: that a belief state is modified minimally to incorporate new information [Makinson, 1993]. Perhaps the most evident way in which a change in belief can be said to be minimal is in terms of standard constructions such as systems of...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: James P. Delgrande, Abhaya C. Nayak, Maurice Pagnucco
• Keywords: AAAI 2004, Belief Change, Belief State, Intelligent Agents, Minimal Change