•  85
    Modern belief revision theory is based to a large extent on partial meet contraction that was introduced in the seminal article by Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson that appeared in 1985. In the same year, Alchourrón and Makinson published a significantly different approach to the same problem, called safe contraction. Since then, safe contraction has received much less attention than partial meet contraction. The present paper summarizes the current state of knowledge on s…Read more
  •  61
    Inter-theoretical reduction has always been a major topic in the structuralist philosophy of science. This paper reviews criteria of adequacy which were put forward by Adams, Sneed, Stegmuller, Mayr, Pearce, Kamlah, and Mormann. The criteria are formalized in a simplified structuralist model, and the logical relations between them are investigated. It turns out that various parts of these criteria are incompatible.
  •  93
    We distinguish the set of explicit beliefs of a reasoner, his "belief base", from the beliefs that are merely implicit. Syntax-based belief change governed by the structure of the belief base and the ranking ("prioritization") of its elements is reconstructed with the help of an epistemic entrenchment relation in the style of Gärdenfors and Makinson. Though priorities are essentially different from entrenchments, distinguished relations of epistemic entrenchment may be obtained from prioritized …Read more
  •  2
    Understanding Fiction: Knowledge and Meaning in Literature (edited book)
    with Jürgen Daiber, Eva-Maria Konrad, and Thomas Petraschka
    Mentis. 2012.
    The book addresses the questions how literature can convey knowledge and how literary meaning can arise in the face of the fact that fictional texts waive the usual claim to truth. Based on the interdisciplinary cooperation of literary scholars and analytic philosophers, the present anthology attempts a) to analyze the possibility and conditions of gaining knowledge through literature, and b) to apply, in a fruitful way, philosophical theories of meaning and interpretation to the constitution of…Read more
  •  55
    Descartes' Meditations do not end up sceptical at all. In fact, the sixth meditation displays an intriguing epistemological optimism. Descartes affirms without reservation that knowledge of the external world is possible. The antisceptical argument at the end of the Meditations is often interpreted as a refutation of dream scepticism, with the conclusion that a person in the waking state can also determine that he or she is awake. We examine the logic of the argument in detail and find that thi…Read more
  •  20
    Zur Wissenschaftsphilosophie von Imre Lakatos
    Philosophia Naturalis 31 25-62. 1994.
    Dogmatic, naive and sophisticated falsificationism are construed as being distinguished by different views on the revisability of scientific theories. Then Lakatos's methodology of scientific research programs (SRP) is reinterpreted: The structure of an SRP is a target theory equipped with a priority structure for hypothetical revisions that accommodate idealizing assumptions. Idealizations pointing "backwards" capture predecessor theories, thus showing both their virtues and limitations. The co…Read more
  •  77
    This paper presents the model of ‘bounded revision’ that is based on two-dimensional revision functions taking as arguments pairs consisting of an input sentence and a reference sentence. The key idea is that the input sentence is accepted as far as (and just a little further than) the reference sentence is ‘cotenable’ with it. Bounded revision satisfies the AGM axioms as well as the Same Beliefs Condition (SBC) saying that the set of beliefs accepted after the revision does not depend on the re…Read more
  •  313
    Two dogmas of belief revision
    Journal of Philosophy 97 (9): 503-522. 2000.
    The paper attacks the almost universally held view that belief revison theories, as they have been studied in the literature of the past two decades, are founded on a Principle of Minimal Change, or Principle of Informational Economy. The principle comes in two versions. According to the first, an agent should, when accepting new information, aim at a posterior belief set that minimizes the items on which it disagrees with the prior belief set. If there are different ways to effect the belief ch…Read more