The Epistemic View of Belief Merging: Can We Track the Truth?

Abstract. Belief merging is often described as the process of defining a base which best represents the beliefs of a group of agents (a profile of belief bases). The resulting base can be viewed as a synthesis of the input profile. In this paper another view of what belief merging aims at is considered: the epistemic view. Under this view the purpose of belief merging is to best approximate the true state of the world. We point out a generalization of Condorcet's Jury Theorem from the belief merging perspective. Roughly, we show that if the beliefs of sufficiently many reliable agents are merged then in the limit the true state of the world is identified. We introduce a new postulate suited to the truth tracking issue. We identify some merging operators from the literature which satisfy it and other operators which do not.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ECAI
• Authors: Patricia Everaere, Sébastien Konieczny, Pierre Marquis
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Belief Merging, Belief Merging Aims, Belief Merging Perspective, ECAI 2010