Entrenchment Relations: A Uniform Approach to Nonmonotonicity

TL;DR

This paper introduces entrenchment relations as a unified framework to generalize nonmonotonic consequence relations, extending concepts from belief revision and expectation inference.

Contribution

It presents entrenchment relations as a new, general approach that unifies Gabbay's nonmonotonic consequence relations with existing belief and expectation models.

Findings

Entrenchment relations can represent Gabbay's nonmonotonic consequence relations.

Provides a unified framework for belief revision and expectation inference.

Extends the concept of epistemic entrenchment to a broader class of nonmonotonic relations.

Abstract

We show that Gabbay's nonmonotonic consequence relations can be reduced to a new family of relations, called entrenchment relations. Entrenchment relations provide a direct generalization of epistemic entrenchment and expectation ordering introduced by Gardenfors and Makinson for the study of belief revision and expectation inference, respectively.