Revising Partially Ordered Beliefs

Abstract

This paper deals with the revision of partially ordered beliefs. It proposes a semantic representation of epistemic states by partial pre-orders on interpretations and a syntactic representation by partially ordered belief bases. Two revision operations, the revision stemming from the history of observations and the possibilistic revision, defined when the epistemic state is represented by a total pre-order, are generalized, at a semantic level, to the case of a partial pre-order on interpretations, and at a syntactic level, to the case of a partially ordered belief base. The equivalence between the two representations is shown for the two revision operations.