On the epistemic entrenchment of different types of knowledge expressed as conditionals in belief revision tasks
Renée Elio · 1996
Some belief revision theories appeal to the notion of epistemic entrenchment as a guide to choosing among alternative ways of removing inconsistency that new information may cause with existing beliefs. While belief revision theorists may not be interested in natural language uses of conditionals per se, the appeal to epistemic entrenchment because certain kinds of knowledge (e.g., physical laws) are expressed in conditional form opens the door to a more careful consideration of whether the syntactic form itself serves as a useful cue, even in the mind of the researcher, for epistemic entrenchment principles. This study determines whether there is any empirical support for the notion that the type of knowledge expressed in a statement can serve as the basis for epistemic entrenchment principles. Four types of knowledge---promises, causal relationships, familiar definitions and unfamiliar definitions---were expressed in a common syntactic if p then q form. A belief revision task was giv...