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Semantic belief change

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dc.contributor.advisor Heidema, J
dc.contributor.advisor Labuschagne, Willem
dc.contributor.author Meyer, Thomas Andreas en
dc.date.accessioned 2015-01-23T04:23:52Z
dc.date.available 2015-01-23T04:23:52Z
dc.date.issued 1999-03 en
dc.identifier.citation Meyer, Thomas Andreas (1999) Semantic belief change, University of South Africa, Pretoria, <http://hdl.handle.net/10500/17452> en
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10500/17452
dc.description.abstract The ability to change one's beliefs in a rational manner is one of many facets of the abilities of an intelligent agent. Central to any investigation of belief change is the notion of an epistemic state. This dissertation is mainly concerned with three issues involving epistemic states: 1. How should an epistemic state be represented? 2. How does an agent use an epistemic state to perform belief change? 3. How does an agent arrive at a particular epistemic state? With regard to the first question, note that there are many different methods for constructing belief change operations. We argue that semantic constructions involving ordered pairs, each consisting of a set of beliefs and an ordering on the set of "possible worlds" (or equivalently, on the set of basic independent bits of information) are, in an important sense, more fundamental. Our answer to the second question provides indirect support for the use of semantic structures. We show how well-known belief change operations and related structures can be modelled semantically. Furthermore, we introduce new forms of belief change related operations and structures which are all defined, and motivated, in terms of such semantic representational formalisms. These include a framework for unifying belief revision and nonmonotonic reasoning, new versions of entrenchment orderings on beliefs, novel approaches to withdrawal operations, and an expanded view of iterated belief change. The third question is. one which has not received much attention in the belief change literature. We propose to extract extra-logical information from the formal representation of an agent's set of beliefs, which can then be used in the construction of epistemic state. his proposal is just a first approximation, although it seems to have the potential for developing into a full-fledged theory.
dc.format.extent 1 electronic resource (viii, 323 leaves) en
dc.language.iso en
dc.subject Belief change
dc.subject Theory change
dc.subject Theory revision
dc.subject Belief revision
dc.subject Epistemic state
dc.subject Epistemic entrenchment
dc.subject Contraction
dc.subject Nonmonotonic reasoning
dc.subject Withdrawal
dc.subject Epistemic entrenchment
dc.subject Base change
dc.subject Base revision
dc.subject Base contraction
dc.subject.ddc 121.6 en
dc.subject.lcsh Nonmonotonic reasoning en
dc.subject.lcsh Philosophy of mind en
dc.subject.lcsh Belief and doubt. en
dc.subject.lcsh Intelligent agents (Computer software) en
dc.subject.lcsh Epistemics. en
dc.title Semantic belief change en
dc.type Thesis
dc.description.department Computing
dc.description.degree D.Phil.(Computer Science) en


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