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Belief Revision, Non-Monotonic Reasoning, and the Ramsey Test

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Knowledge Representation and Defeasible Reasoning

Part of the book series: Studies in Cognitive Systems ((COGS,volume 5))

Abstract

In [Gärdenfors86] Peter Gärdenfors proves that two interesting principles about belief revision — the Ramsey rule and the Preservation principle — cannot both be true given certain arguably innocuous background assumptions about the logic of rational belief change. The two principles can be formulated roughly as follows: the Ramsey rule states that the indicative conditional propositions that an agent believes record that agent’s dispositions to revise beliefs in light of new information; the Preservation Principle states that an agent should not give up old beliefs when revising his or her beliefs to accommodate new information unless the new information contradicts the old beliefs. Faced with a choice between these principles, Gärdenfors tentatively argues for giving up the Ramsey rule.

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Authors
  1. Charles Cross
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Departments of Philosophy and Computer Science, University of Rochester, USA

    Henry E. Kyburg Jr.

  2. Department of Computer Science, Washington University, USA

    Ronald P. Loui

  3. Department of Foreign Languages, University of Rochester, USA

    Greg N. Carlson

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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers

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Cross, C. (1990). Belief Revision, Non-Monotonic Reasoning, and the Ramsey Test. In: Kyburg, H.E., Loui, R.P., Carlson, G.N. (eds) Knowledge Representation and Defeasible Reasoning. Studies in Cognitive Systems, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0553-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0553-5_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-6736-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-009-0553-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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