Contraction in Interrogative Belief Revision
Author
Summary, in English
In the paper "On the role of the research agenda in epistemic change", Olsson and Westlund have suggested that the notion of epistemic state employed in the standard framework of belief revision (Alchourrn et al. 1985; Gardenfors 1988) should be extended to include a representation of the agent's research agenda (Olsson and Westlund 2006). The resulting framework will here be referred to as interrogative belief revision. In this paper, I attempt to deal with the problem of how research agendas should change in contraction, a problem largely left open by Olsson and Westlund. Two desiderata of an appropriate solution are suggested: one is a principle of continuity, stating that changes in the research agenda should somehow reflect that certain long term research interests are kept fixed. The other desideratum, which is based on part of Olsson and Westlund's motivation for adding research agendas to the epistemic states, is that we should be able to account for how contraction may serve to open up new, fruitful hypotheses for investigation. In order to achieve these desiderata, I base my solution on a revised version of Olsson and Westlund's notion of epistemic state.
Department/s
Publishing year
2010
Language
English
Pages
315-335
Publication/Series
Erkenntnis
Volume
72
Issue
3
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Springer
Topic
- Philosophy
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 1572-8420