Contraction, Expansion, Revision, Consolidation, and Merging
In the setting in which all beliefs refer to the same situation, a distinction between various operations that can be performed is made:
- contraction
- removal of a belief;
- expansion
- addition of a belief without checking consistency;
- revision
- addition of a belief while maintaining consistency;
- consolidation
- restoring consistency of a set of beliefs;
- merging
- fusion of two or more sets of beliefs while maintaining consistency.
Revision and merging differ in that the first operation is done when the new belief to incorporate is considered more reliable than the old ones; therefore, consistency is maintained by removing some of the old beliefs. Merging is a more general operation, in that the priority among the belief sets may or may not be the same.
Revision can be performed by first incorporating the new fact and then restoring consistency via consolidation. This is actually a form of merging rather than revision, as the new information is not always treated as more reliable than the old knowledge.
Read more about this topic: Belief Revision
Famous quotes containing the word merging:
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)