Deriving Properties of Belief Update from Theories of Action (II)

Abstract

In [ del Val and Shoham, 1992 ] we showed that the postulates for belief update recently proposed by Katsuno and Mendelzon [ 1991 ] can be analytically derived using the formal theory of action proposed by Lin and Shoham [ 1991 ] . The contribution of this paper is twofold: ffl Whereas in [ del Val and Shoham, 1992 ] we only showed that our encoding of the update problem satisfied the KM postulates, here we use an independently motivated generalization of the theory of action used in that paper to provide a one-to-one correspondence between our construction and KM update semantics. ffl We show how the KM semantics can be generalized by relaxing our construction in a number of ways, each justified in certain intuitive circumstances and each corresponding to one specific postulate. It follows that there are reasonable update operators outside the KM family. 1 Introduction Katsuno and Mendelzon [ 1991 ] have recently proposed a characterization of belief update in terms of a set of po...