Conditionals and monotonic belief revisions: the success postulate

✍ Scribed by Horacio L. Arlo Costa

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1990
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 633 KB
• Volume: 49
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0039-3215
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00370165

✦ Synopsis

One of the main applications of the logic of theory change is to the epistemic analysis of conditionals via the so-called Ramsey test. In the first part of the present note this test is studied in the "limiting case" where the theory being revised is inconsistent, and it is shown that this case manifests an intrinsic incompatibility between the Ramsey test and the AGM postulate of "success". The paper then analyses the use of the postulate of success, and a weakening of it, generating axioms of conditional logic via the test, and it is shown that for certain purposes both success and weak success are quite superfluous. This suggests the proposal of abandoning both success and weak success entirely, thus permitting retention of the postulate of "preservation" discarded by G~irdenfors.