The game of inquiry: The interrogative approach to inquiry and belief revision theory (Q970088)

In a number of publications from 1985 through 2007, J. K. K. Hintikka has developed an ``interrogative model of inquiry'', in which inquiry is viewed as a game played against nature. The author's purpose is to construct operations of belief contraction and revision in that framework. To do this he generalizes Hintikka's rules for bracketing and debracketing and supplements them by a ``bracketing policy'' prescribing how to continue the game when an interrogative tree closes. He shows that the outputs always satisfy the AGM postulates for contraction other than recovery; moreover every AGM contraction on a closed set can be obtained as an output.