This paper presents a general, consistency-based framework for expressing belief change. The framework has good formal properties while being well-suited for implementation. For belief revision, informally, in revising a knowledge base K by a sentence α, we begin with α and include as much of K as consistently possible. This is done by expressing K and α in disjoint languages, asserting that the languages agree on the truth values of corresponding atoms wherever consistently possible, and then re-expressing the result in the original language of K. There may be more than one way in which the languages of K and α can be so correlated: in choice revision, one such “extension” represents the revised state; alternately (skeptical) revision consists of the intersection of all such extensions. Contraction is similarly defined although, interestingly, it is not interdefinable with revision.
The framework is general and flexible. For example, one could go on and express other belief change operations such as update and erasure, and the merging of knowledge bases. Further, the framework allows the incorporation of static and dynamic integrity constraints. The approach is well-suited for implementation: belief change can be equivalently expressed in terms of a finite knowledge base; and the scope of a belief change operation can be restricted to just those propositions common to the knowledge base and sentence for change. We give a high-level algorithm implementing the procedure, and an expression of the approach in Default Logic. Lastly, we briefly discuss two implementations of the approach.
