Belief Revision and Relevance
Peter Gärdenfors · PSA Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association · 1990
The theory of belief revision deals with models of states of belief andtransitionsbetween states of belief. The goal of the theory is to describe what should happen when you update a state of belief with new information. In the most interesting case, the new information isinconsistentwith what you believe. This means that some of the old beliefs have to be deleted if one wants to remain within a consistent state of belief. A guiding idea is that the change should beminimalso that as few of the old beliefs as possible are given up. A central problem for the theory of belief revision is what is meant by a minimal change of a state of belief. The solution to this problem depends to a large extent on themodelof a state of belief that is adopted.