The Best of All PossibleWorlds: Where Interrogative Games Meet Research Agendas

Erik J. Olsson and David Westlund have recently argued that the standard belief revision representation of an epistemic state is defective. In order to adequately model an epistemic state one needs, in addition to a belief set (or corpus, or theory, i.e. a set closed under deduction) K and (say) an entrenchment relation E, a research agenda A, i.e. a set of questions satisfying certain corpus-relative preconditions (hence called K-questions) the agent would like to have answers to. Informally, the preconditions guarantee that the set of potential answers represent a partition of possible expansions of K, hence are equivalent to well-behaved sets of alternative hypotheses.