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Learning by Questions and Answers: From Belief-Revision Cycles to Doxastic Fixed Points

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Book cover Logic, Language, Information and Computation (WoLLIC 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5514))

Abstract

We investigate the long-term behavior of iterated belief revision with higher-level doxastic information. While the classical literature on iterated belief revision [13, 11] deals only with propositional information, we are interested in learning (by an introspective agent, of some partial information about the) answers to various questions Q 1, Q 2, ..., Q n , ... that may refer to the agent’s own beliefs (or even to her belief-revision plans). Here, “learning” can be taken either in the “hard” sense (of becoming absolutely certain of the answer) or in the “soft” sense (accepting some answers as more plausible than others). If the questions are binary (“is φ true or not?”), the agent “learns” a sequence of true doxastic sentences φ 1, ..., φ n , .... “Investigating the long-term behavior” of this process means that we are interested in whether or not the agent’s beliefs, her “knowledge” and her conditional beliefs stabilize eventually or keep changing forever.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford, UK

    Alexandru Baltag

  2. Dep. of Artificial Intelligence & Dep. of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Netherlands

    Sonja Smets

  3. IEG Research Group, University of Oxford, UK

    Sonja Smets

Authors
  1. Alexandru Baltag
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  2. Sonja Smets
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 1-1 Asahidai, Nomi, 923-1292, Ishikawa, Japan

    Hiroakira Ono

  2. National Institute of Informatics, 2–1–2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, 101–8430, Tokyo, Japan

    Makoto Kanazawa

  3. Centro de Informática, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, PE, Brazil

    Ruy de Queiroz

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Baltag, A., Smets, S. (2009). Learning by Questions and Answers: From Belief-Revision Cycles to Doxastic Fixed Points. In: Ono, H., Kanazawa, M., de Queiroz, R. (eds) Logic, Language, Information and Computation. WoLLIC 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5514. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02261-6_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02261-6_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-02260-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-02261-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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