Upcoming Talk: Revising beliefs towards the truth

In October I will be heading up to Wollongong to present at CaféDSL, a weekly research seminar hosted by the Decision Systems Lab in the University of Wollongong School of Computer Science and Software Engineering.

Date and Time: Tuesday 21st, October, 2014. 4pm.

Venue: 6.105 – Smart Building

Title: Revising beliefs towards the truth

Abstract: Traditionally the field of belief revision has been mainly concerned with the relations between sentences (pieces of data) and the logical coherence of revision operations without as much concern for whether the dataset resulting from a belief revision operation has epistemically valuable properties such as truth and relevance. Gardenfors for example, who developed the predominant AGM framework for belief revision, argues that the concepts of truth and falsity become irrelevant for the analysis of belief change as “many epistemological problems can be attacked without using the notions of truth and falsity”. However this may be, given that agents process incoming data with the goal of using it for successful action, this lacuna between belief revision and epistemic utilities such as truth and relevance merits attention.

In this talk I address this issue by presenting some preliminary results concerning the combination of formal truthlikeness/verisimilitude measures with belief revision/merging.

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