Abstract
Epistemic conditionals have often been thought to satisfy the Ramsey test (RT): “If A, then B” is acceptable in a belief state G if and only if B should be accepted upon revising G with A. But as Peter Gärdenfors has shown, RT conflicts with the intuitively plausible condition of Preservation on belief revision. We investigate what happens if (a) RT is retained while Preservation is weakened, or (b) vice versa. We also generalize Gärdenfors' approach by treating belief revision as a relation rather than as a function.
In our semantic approach, the same relation is used to model belief revision and to give truth-conditions for conditionals. The approach validates a weak version of the Ramsey Test (WRR) — essentially, a restriction of RT to maximally consistent belief states.
We prove that alternatives (a) and (b) are both consistent, but argue that (b) is philosophically more promising. Gärdenfors' belief-revision axioms are compatible with WRR together with RT from left to right: the only direction of the test that is defensible on intuitive grounds.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alchourrón, C. E., Gärdenfors, P., and Makinson, D.: 1985, ‘On the Logic of Theory Change: Partial Meet Contraction and Revision Functions’, Journal of Symbolic Logic 50, 510–30.
Chellas, B.: 1975, ‘Basic Conditional Logic’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 4, 133–53.
Dudman, V. H.: 1984, ‘Parsing if-sentences’, Analysis 44, 145–86.
Dudman, V. H.: 1988, ‘Indicative and Subjunctive’, Analysis 48, 114–22.
Gärdenfors, P.: 1988, Knowledge in Flux: Modeling the Dynamics of Epistemic States, Bradford Books: MIT Press, Cambridge.
Gärdenfors, P., Lindström, S., Morreau, M., and Rabinowicz, W.: 1991, ‘The Negative Ramsey Test: Another Triviality Result’, in A. Fuhrmann and M. Morreau (eds.), The Logic of Theory Change, Springer Verlag, Berlin, pp. 129–34.
Grove, A.: 1988, ‘Two Modellings for Theory Change’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 17, 157–70.
Harman, G.: 1986, Change in View: Principles of Reasoning, Bradford Books: MIT Press, Cambridge.
Lehman, D., and Magidor, M.: 1990, ‘What Does a Conditional Knowledge Base Entail?’, Technical Report 90–10, Department of Computer Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Levi, I.: 1977, ‘Subjunctives, Dispositions and Chances’, Synthese 34, 423–55.
Levi, I.: 1988, ‘Iteration of Conditionals and the Ramsey Test’, Synthese 76, 49–81.
Lindström, S., and Rabinowicz, W.: 1989, ‘On Probabilistic Representation of Non-probabilistic Belief Revision’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 18, 69–101.
Lindström, S., and Rabinowicz, W.: 1991, ‘Epistemic Entrenchment with Incomparabilities and Relational Belief Revision’, in A. Fuhrmann and M. Morreau (eds.), The Logic of Theory Change, Springer Verlag, Berlin, pp. 93–128.
Sahlin, N.-E.: 1990, The Philosophy of F. P. Ramsey, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Segerberg, K.: 1986, ‘On the Logic of Small Changes of Theories I’, in Auckland Philosophy Papers, Report No. 1.
Segerberg, K.: 1989, ‘A Note on an Impossibility Theorem of Gärdenfors’, Noûs 23, 351–54.
Smiley, T.: 1983–84, ‘Hunter on Conditionals’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 84, 242–49.
Stalnaker, R.: 1984, Inquiry, MIT Press, Cambridge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference on the dynamics of knowledge and belief at Lund University, 24–26 August 1989. We wish to thank Sven Danielsson, Peter Gärdenfors, Sören Halldén, David Makinson, Hugh Mellor, Michael Morreau, Nils-Eric Sahlin and Brian Skyrms for their very helpful suggestions and remarks. We are also grateful for thought-provoking criticism and comments from two anonymous referees.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lindström, S., Rabinowicz, W. Belief revision, epistemic conditionals and the Ramsey test. Synthese 91, 195–237 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00413567
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00413567