TITLE: Minimal Belief Change and the Pareto Principle.
TIME: Thursday, September 27, 2001 12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m; ASB 9705
ABSTRACT:
In the last two decades or so, many logicians have devoted efforts to analyzing the notion of a minimal belief change that incorporates new information. The talk introduces this subject and some of the basic ideas in the area. There will be technical content, but no background in the area is assumed. I will show how to apply the fundamental decision-theoretic principle of Pareto-optimality to derive a notion of minimal belief change. One of the discoveries of logical work in this area is that there are strong correspondences between postulates for belief change and conditional axioms (axioms for statements of the form "if p, then q"). I will explain how the general method for relating belief revision to conditional logics works, and then show that Pareto-minimal belief change corresponds exactly to a fragment of a well-known conditional logic (Lewis' VC).