Ana Cholodovskis (LMU, Munich): From Centered to Uncentered - Determining Belief Functions for Uncentered Worlds Given Belief Functions to Centered Worlds

Belief Revision is a formal process that can be used to modify one’s beliefs when new information is acquired. The new information might be represented by means of uncentered or centered worlds. Centered worlds, which are used to model indexical information, can be taken to be pairs <c,w> consisting of a center c and a possible world w; while an uncentered world is just the world w. Several models of belief revision on uncentered worlds have been proposed in the literature. But how should belief revision on centered worlds proceed? Does belief revision for centered worlds uniquely and rationally determine belief revision for uncentered worlds? As it turns out, Arrow’s famous Impossibility Theorem for the aggregation of preference orderings may give us some interesting insights into these questions.

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