A general family of preferential belief removal operators

Abstract

Most belief change operators in the AGM tradition assume an underlying plausibility ordering over the possible worlds which is transitive and complete. A unifying structure for these operators, based on supplementing the plausibility ordering with a second, guiding, relation over the worlds was presented in Booth et al. (Artif Intell 174:1339–1368, 2010). However it is not always reasonable to assume completeness of the underlying ordering. In this paper we generalise the structure of Booth et al. (Artif Intell 174:1339–1368, 2010) to allow incomparabilities between worlds. We axiomatise the resulting class of belief removal functions, and show that it includes an important family of removal functions based on finite prioritised belief bases.