Scope:

Studying the dynamic nature of beliefs is the main motivation behind the emergence of Belief Revision, the field focussed on the process of updating beliefs, as well as revising them to consistently accept a new piece of information. It is basically the product of two converging research traditions. The first one has a computer science flavor, with its origins in the development of procedures to update databases;the second one is more philosophical, and has its origins in the discussion of the mechanisms by which scientific theories develop, proposing requirements for rational belief change.

Belief Revision focusses on the process of modifying beliefs so as to accept a new piece information in a consistent manner. One of the most important traditions in the field is the Alchourrón-Gärdenfors-Makinson (AGM) model introduced in 1985. Over the years, there has been a lot of work extending and modifying the AGM-style of belief revision. The approach gives priority to the incoming information. Theories of non-prioritized belief change have emerged as a counterpart to this prioritization. Aggregation of finite sets of information, all of them with similar structure and arbitrary precedence, into a collective one is the main idea behind Belief Merging.

A major manifestation of the ''dynamic turn'' in logic: Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) is the combination of two traditions in formal logic: Epistemic Logic (EL) and Dynamic semantics. This framework has been extended so as to incorporate the notion of belief, allowing us to describe agents with knowledge and beliefs about the situations and also about the executed actions. With this notion of doxastic action, it is possible to deal with both static (referring to the AGM-style) and dynamic belief revision and also implement various belief-revision policies in a unified framework.

With these different kind of approaches to belief revision that have developed in the past three decades, the workshop aims to give a substantive overview of the extensive work that is going on in these areas.

Speakers:

Alexandru Baltag, University of Oxford
Richard Booth, University of Luxembourg
Aditya Ghose, University of Wollongong
Gabriele Kern-Isberner, University of Dortmund
Sonja Smets, University of Groningen

Organiser:

Sujata Ghosh, University of Groningen