Multiple contraction revisited

Wolfgang Spohn

pp. 279-288

in: Mauricio Surez, Mauro Dorato, Miklós Rédei (eds), Epsa epistemology and methodology of science, Berlin, Springer, 2010

Abstract

Multiple contraction consists in giving up several beliefs at once. The treatments of multiple contraction in AGM belief revision theory have remained unsatisfactory. The paper proposes a clear, plausible, and general model for multiple contraction in ranking-theoretic terms according to which multiple contraction turns out to reduce to single contractions. The belief set multiply contracted by {A ₁, …, A _n } is just the intersection of all the belief sets singly contracted by A _i (i = 1, …, n).