A framework for managing uncertain inputs: An axiomization of rewarding

The success postulate in belief revision ensures that new evidence (input) is always trusted. However, admitting uncertain input has been questioned by many researchers. Darwiche and Pearl argued that strengths of evidence should be introduced to determine the outcome of belief change, and provided a preliminary definition towards this thought. In this paper, we start with Darwiche and Pearl's idea aiming to develop a framework that can capture the influence of the strengths of inputs with some rational assumptions. To achieve this, we first define epistemic states to represent beliefs attached with strength, and then present a set of postulates to describe the change process on epistemic states that is determined by the strengths of input and establish representation theorems to characterize these postulates. As a result, we obtain a unique rewarding operator which is proved to be a merging operator that is in line with many other works. We also investigate existing postulates on belief merging and compare them with our postulates. In addition, we show that from an epistemic state, a corresponding ordinal conditional function by Spohn can be derived and the result of combining two epistemic states is thus reduced to the result of combining two corresponding ordinal conditional functions proposed by Laverny and Lang. Furthermore, when reduced to the belief revision situation, we prove that our results induce all the Darwiche and Pearl's postulates as well as the Recalcitrance postulate and the Independence postulate. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.