Reasoning without minimality

DOI10.1007/BFB0095263MaRDI QIDQ4260694zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Abhaya C. Nayak, Norman Y. Foo

Publication date 22 June 2000

Published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1007/BFB0095263

zbMATH Keywords

belief changebelief revisionminimality semanticsminimality under a relationnon-maximality semanticsnon-maximality under a relationnonmonotonic inference

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Logics of knowledge and belief (including belief change) (03B42) Other nonclassical logic (03B60) Logic in artificial intelligence (68T27)

Review text

There are a number of areas of logic where the central semantic construction makes use of the notion of minimality under a relation. These areas include nonmonotonic inference, belief revision, updating, counterfactual and other conditionals, and deontic reasoning (see for example the reviewer's comparative survey ``Five faces of minimality [Stud. Log. 52, No. 3, 339-379 (1993; Zbl 0790.03026)]). The authors raise the question: what happens if instead of minimality under a relation, one makes use of non-maximality under that relation? They investigate this question in the particular area of belief revision. Terminology can be confusing. The authors call this ``a non-minimal model of belief change, because it does not use minimality. But it might better be called ``a non-maximality account of belief change, because the key notion used is the set of all elements of a set that are non-maximal under the relation. Surprisingly, as the authors show by a short and elegant argument, their non-maximality semantics for belief revision is not reducible to the minimality semantics, except in trivial models. It satisfies the ``basic AGM postulates, and of the two ``supplementary postulates (*7) and (*8), satisfies (*8) but not in general (*7). However, it does satisfy (*7) under certain special conditions, and these provide postulates for which the authors prove an appropriate completeness theorem. Finally, the authors consider the objection that in a simple ``tweety example, their non-maximal account does not give ``intuitively correct results. In the reviewer's opinion, their defence on this point is not very convincing. But however that may be, the work retains its mathematical interest. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0903.00075].

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Cited in

(6)

• Five faces of minimality
• A local meshless collocation method for solving certain inverse problems
• Minimising disjunctive information
• Entailment, transmission of truth, and minimality
• Minimal Logicism
• Monotonicity in Intuitionistic Minimal Change Semantics Given Gärdenfors’ Triviality Result

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