Belief Change and Non-Monotonic Reasoning Sans Compactness

Abstract

Belief change and non-monotonic reasoning are arguably different perspectives on the same phenomenon, namely, jettisoning of currently held beliefs in response to some incompatible evidence. Investigations in this area typically assume, among other things, that the underlying (background) logic is compact, that is, whatever can be inferred from a set of sentences X can be inferred from a finite subset of X. Recent research in the field shows that this compactness assumption can be dispensed without inflicting much damage on the AGM paradigm of belief change. In this paper we investigate the impact of such relaxation on non-monotonic logics instead. In particular, we show that, when compactness is not guaranteed, while the bridge from the AGM paradigm of belief change to expectation logics remains unaffected, the “return trip” from expectation logics to AGM paradigm is no longer guaranteed. We finally explore the conditions under which such guarantee can be given.