Confluence operators and their relationships with revision, update and merging (Q2248519)

This paper takes its origin from a question raised by Andreas Herzig in a 2005 Dagstuhl seminar: if belief merging can be seen as a generalized version of revision, what is the corresponding generalization of belief update? That question is echoed by another: if update is a point-wise version of belief revision, what is the corresponding point-wise version of merging? Preliminary work was reported by the authors in conference proceedings of 2008; the paper under review gives final results. It identifies a class of functions, dubbed confluence operators, that answers both questions, thus forming a square of four kinds of epistemic change that in some sense commutes. Confluence operators are presented via both postulates (for a finite propositional language, with belief sets represented as individual sentences in the manner of Katsuno \& Mendelzon) and semantic valuation systems (using total preorders over a set of states), with an appropriate representation theorem proven. Similarities and contrasts with merging and update are described and, as part of a discussion of possible applications, a more specific construction using Dalal distances between interpretations is given. On the theoretical level, it is left as an open problem whether it is possible to generalize the semantics to pre-orders that are not total; to which the reviewer would add the question of generalizing from the finite case to that of a countable propositional language, as well as that of elucidating further the sense in which the square commutes.