Study on Quantitative Dynamic Epistemic Logic for Belief Revision

Abstract: Belief revision is a process in which an agent begins to believe in something she previously did not. I begin the paper by presenting, based on (Gärdenfors, 1998; Hansson, 1999), postulates for belief revision that constitute the basis of the AGM theory. I will then briefly show the semantics of a modal logic introduced in (van Ditmarsch, 2005), which I call $P$'. This logic formalizes static epistemic states and has greater expressive power than AGM in doing so because it captures the quantitative notion of "degrees of conviction". The third step is to introduce revision operators on $P$ and, mostly following (van Ditmarsch, 2005), obtain the Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) I call$P*$'. It models processes of belief revision in several ways. Original results are presented in the following two sections. The first one of these sections revolves around a formalization of AGM postulates within $P*$ by proving some theorems related to the satisfaction of those postulates by revisions defined in $P*$. The last section features an analysis of $P*$'s revisions that go beyond the mere satisfaction of postulates. I compare their formal behavior with respect to some philosophical criteria. At last, I conclude that the functions presented in (van Ditmarsch, 2005) are not good formalizations of the philosophical intuition behind AGM. Instead, it is captured by the function $*^0$ originally defined in this paper (but highly inspired by (van Benthem, 2007)). An implementation of this function is also provided.