Trust-sensitive Belief Revision

Richard Booth (Cardiff University)

Richard Booth (Cardiff) will present "Trust-sensitive Belief Revision" at 12 on 6 April in Old Quad G10.

Abstract: Belief revision is concerned with incorporating new information into a pre-existing set of beliefs. When the new information comes from another agent, we must first determine if that agent should be trusted. In this talk, we define trust as a pre-processing step before revision. We emphasise that trust in an agent is often restricted to a particular domain of expertise. We demonstrate that this form of trust can be captured by associating a state partition with each agent, then relativising all reports to this partition before revising. We position the resulting family of trust-sensitive revision operators within the class of selective revision operators of Ferme and Hansson, and we examine its properties. In particular, we show how trust-sensitive revision is manipulable, in the sense that agents can sometimes have incentive to pass on misleading information. This is joint work with Aaron Hunter.