Handling conditionals adequately in uncertain reasoning and belief revision
Gabriele Kern-Isberner · Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics · 2002
Conditionals (“if-then-rules”) are most important objects in knowledge representation, commonsense reasoning and belief revision. Due to their non-classical nature, however, they are not easily dealt with. This paper presents a new approach to conditionals, which is apt to capture their dynamic power particularly well. We show how this approach can be applied to represent conditional knowledge inductively, and to guide revisions of epistemic states by sets of (propositional or conditional) beliefs. In particular, we generalize system-Z* as an appropriate counterpart to maximum entropy-representations in a semi-quantitative setting, and provide a theoretical justification to make its basic ideas usable also for belief revision.