Semi-revision (Q3128372)

On the AGM approach, operations of revision satisfy a postulate of ``success'', that the input sentence is always accepted. The author considers revision operations for which this need not be so. His approach is tailored to the revision of theories presented via a belief base, rather than those presented as simply a set of formulae closed under consequence. The essential idea is to take the ``semi-revision'' of a belief base \(A\) by a sentence \(\alpha\) to be \((A\cup\{\alpha\})-\perp\), where \(\perp\) is a contradiction and -- is an operation of belief base contraction, defined for example via a ``partial meet'' construction following the AGM account, or as a ``kernel contraction'' following previous work of the author. Contraction of a belief base by \(\perp\) is called by the author ``consolidation''. Reviewer's comment: Although several authors had already suggested the need to study revision operations that may fail success, the paper under review appears to be the first to do so in a formal manner. A number of subsequent papers with different approaches, have been gathered by the same author in an issue of the journal Theoria dedicated to the subject, to appear in late 1997.