Abstract:

Agents, if sufficiently complex, have mental models of the world and ways
to transform at least some of the information provided by the models into
sentences. We may think of such sentences as expressing beliefs. When new
information becomes available, the agent's beliefs change (or should!) in
order to accommodate what it has learnt. But this change often means giving
up some of the previously held beliefs in order to avoid inconsistency. One
way of determining which beliefs should be surrendered is to use an
epistemic entrenchment ordering.

This talk informally describes how epistemic entrenchment orderings work
and how they link up with the idea of information. For a full account which
spells out the technical details, see Meyer TA, Labuschagne WA, and Heidema
J: Refined Epistemic Entrenchment. Journal of Logic, Language, and
Information, 9 (2000) 237-259.
 

Dr WA Labuschagne
Department of Computer Science
University of Otago
Dunedin
New Zealand