Abstract Causal decision theorists update by conditionalization on their own acts, just like evidential decision theorists and rational pure observers do. But should they? Imaging, due to Lewis and Gärdenfors, can be treated as a counterfactual‐inspired recipe for belief revision. In a decision‐theoretic context, a longstanding, though not popular, gloss on imaging involves norms of update: conditioning is the correct response to learning that is the case, while imaging is the correct response to making the case. Here, I aim to counter a major obstacle to the viability of the claim that it can be rational to update by imaging: the diachronic Dutch Book.

Building on the analysis of Bonanno G. Artificial Intelligence 339 we introduce a simple modal logic containing three modal operators: a unimodal belief operator B , a bimodal conditional operator > and the unimodal global operator ◻ . For each AGM axiom for belief revision, we provide a corresponding modal axiom. The correspondence is as follows: each AGM axiom is characterized by a property of the Kripke–Lewis frames considered in Bonanno G. Artificial Intelligence 339 and, in turn, that property characterizes the corresponding modal axiom.

People must sometimes choose between seeking accurate beliefs and upholding partisan beliefs. How do people evaluate individuals who diverge from an inaccurate ingroup consensus in their pursuit of truth? To answer this question, we conducted two preregistered studies with adults and 6- to 9-year-old children from the United States (N = 632). Participants evaluated information-seeking, belief change, belief stasis, and outgroup belief endorsement in scenarios involving conflicting intergroup ideologies, in which adopting a new belief entailed a departure from an ingrained belief held by fellow group members. Both adults and children praised others for pursuing the truth through information-seeking and belief revision and for telling others that an evidence-based outgroup belief is correct. However, these positive evaluations were less pronounced for real-world, politically divisive issues in which participants' own political group's beliefs were at stake (Study 1), as compared to hypothetical situations involving fictional groups and novel beliefs (Study 2). Overall, these results indicate that people think it is generally desirable for others to pursue accuracy even at the cost of group loyalty, and this is true by the age of 6. Thus, the formation and retention of unsupported partisan beliefs may frequently be misaligned with the epistemic values that people reflectively endorse. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The selective revision of beliefs in light of new evidence has been considered one of the hallmarks of human-level rationality. However, tests of this ability in other species are lacking. We examined whether and how chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) update their initial belief about the location of a reward in response to conflicting evidence. Chimpanzees responded to counterevidence in ways predicted by a formal model of rational belief revision: They remained committed to their initial belief when the evidence supporting the alternative belief was weaker, but they revised their initial belief when the supporting evidence was stronger. Results suggest that this pattern of belief revision was guided by the explicit representation and weighing of evidence. Taken together, these findings indicate that chimpanzees metacognitively evaluate conflicting pieces of evidence within a reflective process.

Abstract What is the proper way to transfinitely extend the usual hierarchy of finite metainferential levels? McAllister ( Journal of Philosophical Logic, 51 , 1345–1365, 2022; Belief Revision About Logic , PhD Thesis, University of Auckland, 2024) has proven that classical logic and numerous other logics are non-unique in classical set theory. On the basis of these results, she argues for a range of philosophical consequences, including problems for logical monism, classical set theory, and the identification of logics. This paper demonstrates that McAllister’s key results are merely artifacts of the level labels which she adds to the transfinite hierarchy. It is proven that, in the absence of labels, every logic is unique in classical set theory. Moreover, I argue that if labels are not innocent additions, but instead influence the results in substantial ways, then they must be left out of the hierarchy. Therefore, in the final analysis, every logic is unique. The various problems which McAllister extracts from non-uniqueness accordingly dissolve.

Human self-beliefs hinge on social feedback, but their formation and revision are not solely based on new information. Biases during learning, such as confirming initial expectations, can lead to inaccurate beliefs. This study uses computational modeling to explore how initial expectations about one’s own and others’ abilities and confidence in these beliefs affect processes of belief formation and belief revision in novel behavioral domains. In the first session, participants formed performance beliefs through trial-by-trial feedback. In the second session, feedback contingencies were reversed to promote a revision of beliefs. Results showed that people form and revise beliefs in a confirmatory manner, with lower initial expectations being linked to more negatively biased belief formation and revision, while growing confidence strengthened these beliefs over time. Once formed, these beliefs proved resistant to change even when faced with contradictory feedback. The findings suggest that newly formed beliefs become entrenched and resistant to new, contradictory information in a short period of time. Understanding how self-beliefs are formed, the role that confidence plays in this process, and why established beliefs are difficult to revise can inform the development of interventions aimed at promoting more adaptive learning in educational, clinical, and social contexts.

Updating inferences about negative events: Does the direction of the update matter?

We examined whether practice testing enhances learning from persuasive texts and influences attitude change. In two online experiments, participants read texts on biodiversity loss (Study 1, n = 454) or wolf recolonization (Study 2, n = 400) and were assigned to one of three conditions: pretesting (guessing before reading), posttesting (retrieving after reading), or no-testing. Both testing conditions improved knowledge retention compared to no-testing, with no consistent differences between pre- and posttesting. Across all conditions, attitudes shifted in the expected direction—biodiversity loss was perceived as more severe, and wolf recolonization more positively after reading. However, neither testing condition led to greater attitude change than no-testing. A systematic association between final knowledge and attitude emerged only in the pretesting group, suggesting that generating responses before learning may have promoted attitude change in some individuals. These findings demonstrate that practice testing enhances knowledge acquisition from persuasive texts but does not reliably amplify attitude change. This suggests that while retrieval-based learning strengthens memory for persuasive content, additional factors may be required to translate knowledge gains into belief revision. Our results highlight the complex relationship between knowledge and attitudes and contribute to understanding the role of test-enhanced learning in persuasion.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-025-20874-1.

Abstract This paper offers an interpretation of Aristotle’s claim that epistēmē haplōs requires the knower to be ‘incapable of being persuaded otherwise’ (ametapeistos). The claim is interpreted as a requirement that a scientist with fully settled knowledge not undergo rational belief revision, itself a version of the Socratic idea that true knowledge is not subject to refutation or elenchos. Aristotle reduces this requirement to a pair of conditions regarding the knowledge and conviction (pistis) the scientist has in her principles. It is shown that these conditions serve to rule out precisely the types of refutation Aristotle takes to be incompatible with scientific knowledge.

When do households listen to the Fed? We show the answer lies in a simple but powerful force: household attention to macroeconomic conditions. We develop a model where attention acts as a crucial gatekeeper for the pass-through of policy news to beliefs, and confirm its predictions using household survey data. We find that belief revisions to monetary policy surprises are concentrated among attentive individuals—particularly those with high financial stakes—and this effect strengthens dramatically during uncertain times. This implies the expectations channel is most potent when it matters most, suggesting policymakers should account for the time-varying and heterogeneous nature of public attention.

Bayesian updating, also known as belief revision or conditioning, is a core mechanism of probability theory, and of AI. The human mind is very sensitive to the order in which it is being “primed”, but Bayesian updating works commutatively: the order of the evidence does not matter. Thus, there is a mismatch. This paper develops Bayesian updating as an explicit operation on (discrete) probability distributions, so that the commutativity of Bayesian updating can be clearly formulated and made explicit in several examples. The commutativity mismatch is underexplored, but plays a fundamental role, for instance in the move to quantum cognition.

Abstract I outline a novel counterexample to the principle of belief revision, Anticipation: if both learning and learning not‐ would render belief in unjustified, you cannot now be justified in believing . If I am right, not only is the leading theory of belief revision false, so are various recently proposed weakenings. I develop and defend a new theory that correctly predicts the failures of Anticipation I argue for, predicated on the simple idea that one is justified in ruling out possibility just in case that possibility is sufficiently improbable.

In 2005, India launched the Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) program, which has augmented access to medical services and health education in marginalized rural communities. Despite notable progress in health delivery, uptake of medical services remains below target levels. The current research asked ASHAs and their clients why people reject medical advice and what the ASHAs could do to convince them otherwise. Our results identify a consistent mismatch between reasons to reject advice versus how to persuade clients to follow the advice. Two reasons were primarily cited for rejecting the uptake of medical services: insufficient or inaccurate understanding of the medical benefits of these services and the dynamics of the social situation, such as pressure from family members. In contrast, the predominant solutions addressed these knowledge gaps; ASHAs and their clients felt that highlighting the health advantages would be the most effective persuasion technique. ASHAs and their clients infrequently mentioned strategies addressing societal dynamics and norms. This mismatch between barriers to uptake and solutions suggests that the ASHA program inadvertently operates with a "deficit model" of decision-making and persuasion. The deficit model is the belief that the way to convince people to comply with health recommendations is to address their knowledge deficit by educating them on the medical benefits. The current research suggests that ASHAs should be trained in the science of belief revision and behavior change, which requires directly addressing the concerns and motivations of others, not just providing information.

Belief change is a core component of intelligent reasoning, enabling agents to adapt their beliefs in response to new information. A prominent form of belief change is belief revision, which involves altering an agent’s beliefs about a static (unchanging) world in light of new evidence. A foundational framework for modeling rational belief revision was introduced by Alchourrón, Gärdenfors, and Makinson (AGM), who formalized revision functions based on total preorders over possible worlds—that is, orderings that encode the relative plausibility of alternative states of affairs. Building on this, Peppas and Williams later characterized AGM-style revision functions using weaker preference structures known as semiorders, which, unlike total preorders, permit intransitive indifference between alternatives. In this article, we extend the framework of Peppas and Williams to the context of belief update. In contrast to belief revision, belief update concerns maintaining coherent beliefs in response to actual changes in a dynamic, evolving environment. We provide both axiomatic and semantic characterizations of update functions derived from semiorders, establishing corresponding representation theorems. These results essentially generalize the classical belief-update framework of Katsuno and Mendelzon, which relies on total preorders, thereby offering a broader and more flexible perspective. The intransitivity of indifference inherent in semiorders plays a central role in our framework, enabling the representation of nuanced plausibility distinctions between possible states of affairs—an essential feature for realistically modeling belief dynamics.

It's time to reconsider: the neuropsychology of belief change.

Conditional independence is a crucial concept supporting adequate modelling and efficient reasoning in probabilistics. In knowledge representation, the idea of conditional independence has also been introduced for specific formalisms, such as propositional logic and belief revision. In this paper, the notion of conditional independence is studied in the algebraic framework of approximation fixpoint theory. This gives a language-independent account of conditional independence that can be straightforwardly applied to any logic with fixpoint semantics. It is shown how this notion allows to reduce global reasoning to parallel instances of local reasoning, leading to fixed-parameter tractability results. Furthermore, relations to existing notions of conditional independence are discussed and the framework is applied to normal logic programming.

We extend belief revision theory from propositional logic to the modal logic S5. Our first contribution takes the form of three new postulates (M1-M3) that go beyond the AGM ones and capture the idea of minimal change in the presence of modalities. Concerning the construction of modal revision operations, we work with set pseudo-distances, i.e., distances between sets of points that may violate the triangle-inequality. Our second contribution is the identification of three axioms (A3-A5) that go beyond the standard axioms of metrics. Loosely speaking, our main result states the following: if a pseudo-distance satisfies certain axioms, then the induced revision operation satisfies (M1-M3). We investigate three pseudo-distances from the literature (Dhaus, Dinj, Dsum), and the three induced revision operations (*Haus, *Inj, *Sum). Using our main result, we show that only *Sum satisfies (M1-M3) all together. As a last contribution, we revisit a major criticism of AGM operations, namely that the revisions of (p ∧ q) and (p ∧ (p → q)) are identical. We show that the problem disappears if instead of material implication we use the modal operator of strict implication that can be defined in S5.

We investigated the role of children's conflict monitoring skills in revising an intuitive scientific theory. Children aged 5 to 9 (N = 177; 53% girls, data collected in Germany from 2019-2023) completed computer-based tasks on water displacement, a concept prone to misconceptions. Children predicted which of two objects would displace more water before receiving feedback. With increasing age, children showed slower response times for incorrect predictions (β = -0.04) and greater pupil dilation to unexpected outcomes (β = -0.04), indicating better conflict monitoring. Better conflict monitoring, in turn, predicted faster belief revision (β = 0.07). These findings suggest that conflict monitoring is crucial for learning in discovery-based activities.

“Suspension of judgment” is an ambiguous term that may refer either to a doxastic state (“suspended judgment”) or to a doxastic action (“suspending judgment”). Based on a simple non-belief account, this paper presents a formal study of both aspects of suspension. We first introduce the notion of a suspension set (a set of non-beliefs) and determine its logical structure. Then we present the classical AGM operations of belief revision and belief contraction and give characterizations of them that refer to suspension sets rather than belief sets. Finally, we study the suspension operation, a symmetric cousin of belief contraction, and characterize it both in terms of belief sets and in terms of suspension sets. Belief contraction and belief suspension thereby get reinterpreted as two different forms of the expansion of suspension sets. The project is interesting because in contrast to belief revision and belief contraction, the suspension operation is symmetric with respect to negation: suspending judgment on A is the same as suspending judgment on ¬A. Most of our results are premised on an assumption of modesty: For every person with consistent beliefs, there is always at least one proposition on which she suspends judgment.

Belief revision and belief update are two fundamental and well-studied processes of belief change. In the present article, we introduce a consistency principle which dictates that the revision and update policies employed by a rational agent are not independent, but ought to be related in a certain coherent way. We formalize our consistency principle both axiomatically and semantically, and we establish a representation result explicitly connecting the two formalizations. Furthermore, we show that two important concrete types of belief change, namely uniform belief change and parametrized-difference belief change, serve as proof-of-concept examples for the introduced consistency principle, as they fully comply with it. Additionally, we identify an intriguing property of uniform belief change in which revision and update become indistinguishable when an epistemic input contradicts the initial state of belief, as both processes produce identical outcomes. Lastly, it is shown that, unlike parametrized-difference belief change, uniform belief change is incompatible with Parikh’s notion of relevance. Consequently, building on previous results, it is demonstrated that parametrized-difference belief change is relevance-sensitive — indicating that the proposed principle of consistency is compatible with relevance — while uniform belief change is not.