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The Logic of Belief Persistence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Pierpaolo Battigalli  and
Giacomo Bonanno
Pierpaolo Battigalli
Affiliation:
Princeton University
Giacomo Bonanno
Affiliation:
University of California
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Extract

The principle of belief persistence, or conservativity principle, states that ‘When changing beliefs in response to new evidence, you should continue to believe as many of the old beliefs as possible’ (Harman, 1986, p. 46). In particular, this means that if an individual gets new information, she has to accommodate it in her new belief set (the set of propositions she believes), and, if the new information is not inconsistent with the old belief set, then (1) the individual has to maintain all the beliefs she previously had and (2) the change should be minimal in the sense that every proposition in the new belief set must be deducible from the union of the old belief set and the new information (see, e.g., Gärdenfors, 1988; Stalnaker, 1984). We focus on this minimal notion of belief persistence and characterize it both semantically and syntactically.

Type
Essays
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , April 1997 , pp. 39 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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