Gricean Belief Change

Dr Abhaya Nayak
Senior Lecturer
Department of Computing Macquarie University

*** NOTE UNUSUAL TIME - 1 HOUR LATER THAN USUAL ***

Tuesday 12 April 2005 at 12 noon

Abstract

One of the standard principles of rationality guiding traditional accounts of belief change is the principle of minimal change: a reasoner's belief corpus should be modified in a minimal fashion when assimilating new information. This rationality principle has stood belief change in good stead. However, it does not deal properly with all belief change scenarios. We introduce a novel account of belief change motivated by one of Grice's maxims of conversational implicature: the reasoner's belief corpus is modified in a minimal fashion to assimilate exactly the new information. In this form of belief change, when the reasoner revises by new information (p OR q) their belief corpus is modified so that (p OR q) is believed but stronger propositions like (p AND q) are not, no matter what beliefs are in the reasoner's initial corpus. We term this conservative belief change since the revised belief corpus is a conservative extension of the original belief corpus given the new information.

Short resume

Abhaya Nayak is a faculty member in the Department of Computing, at Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia.

He typically teaches units related to Artificial Intelligence, Programming and Database Systems. His research interests include Belief Revision, Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Reasoning about Action, and Intelligent Information Assimilation. He is particularly interested in the application of Social Choice Theory in the context of information management.

Abhaya is a co-founder of the Intelligent Systems Group at Macquarie, the other founder being Mehmet Orgun. They jointly supervise the functioning of this research group. Recently, Abhaya has acted as the convenor of the bid for KnowledgeNet, an ARC Research Network. Dr Nayak is also closely associated with the Knowledge Systems Group at the University of the New South Wales as one of its core members and the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Unit of National ICT Australia (NICTA).

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