Refined Epistemic Entrenchment

  • Authors:
  • Thomas Andreas Meyer;Willem Adrian Labuschagne;Johannes Heidema

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa (E-mail: tmeyer@cs.up.ac.za);Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of South Africa, Box 392, Pretoria 0003, South Africa (E-mail: labuswa@alpha.unisa.ac.za);Department of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Astronomy, University of South Africa, Box 392, Pretoria 0003, South Africa (E-mail: heidej@alpha.unisa.ac.za)

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Logic, Language and Information
  • Year:
  • 2000

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Epistemic entrenchment, as presented by Gärdenfors and Makinson (1988) and Gärdenfors (1988), is a formalisation of the intuition that, when forced to choose between two beliefs, an agent will giveup the less entrenched one. While their formalisation satisfactorilycaptures the intuitive notion of the entrenchment of beliefs in a number ofaspects, the requirement that all wffs be comparable has drawn criticismfrom various quarters. We define a set of refined versions of theirentrenchment orderings that are not subject to the same criticism, andinvestigate the relationship between the refined entrenched orderings,the entrenchment orderings of Gärdenfors and Makinson, and AGM theorycontraction (Alchourrón et al., 1985). To conclude, we compare refinedentrenchment with two related approaches to epistemic entrenchment.