Conditional doxastic models: a qualitative approach to dynamic belief revision

Journal article

In this paper, we present a semantical approach to multi-agent belief revision and belief update. For this, we introduce relational structures called conditional doxastic models (CDM's, for short). We show this setting to be equivalent to an epistemic version of the classical AGM Belief Revision theory. We present a logic of conditional beliefs that is complete w.r.t. CDM's. Moving then to belief updates (sometimes called "dynamic" belief revision) induced by epistemic actions, we consider two particular cases: public announcements and private announcements to subgroups of agents. We show how the standard semantics for these types of updates can be appropriately modified in order to apply it to CDM's, thus incorporating belief revision into our notion of update. We provide a complete axiomatization of the corresponding dynamic doxastic logics. As an application, we solve a "cheating version" of the Muddy Children Puzzle.

Authors: Baltag, A; Smets, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science
• Volume: 165
• Pages: 5-21
• Publication date: 2006-11-01
• Edition: Publisher's version
• DOI: 10.1016/j.entcs.2006.05.034
• ISSN: 1571-0661
• Language: English
• Keywords: belief revision; multi-agent system; public announcement; conditional belief; modal logic; dynamic epistemic logic; belief update
• Subjects: Computer science (mathematics)