Merging Beliefs and Counterfactuals
Merging Beliefs and Counterfactuals
Emiliano Lorini, Dmitry Rozplokhas
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3952-3960.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/440
We present a unified framework for modeling
agents’ epistemic states and counterfactual conditionals.
The novelty of our approach lies at the
semantic level. We introduce a computationally
grounded semantics in which an agent’s doxastic
accessibility relation, needed to model the standard
notion of deductively closed belief, is derived from the agent’s belief base,
and in which the notion of comparative similarity between states,
needed to interpret counterfactual conditionals, is
computed from both the atomic formulas describing
the agents’ belief bases and those describing
the environment. We use this semantics to interpret a language
of beliefs and counterfactuals. We
demonstrate the expressiveness of our language and
the flexibility of the semantics by formalizing a
wide range of notions: counterfactual dependence,
counterfactual notions of reason and knowledge,
conditional belief. Furthermore, we show that our
semantics illuminates the subtle interplay between
belief change and counterfactuals. On the computational side,
we provide a succinct formulation of
model checking for our language and establish a
PSPACE complexity result.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Belief change
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Knowledge representation languages
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Reasoning about knowledge and belief
