To Table of Contents 6'98

Mathesis Universalis - No.6, Spring 1998

John Cantwell ABSTRACT

Resolving conflicting information
- a qualitative approach

Different sources of information may supply conflicting information. It turns out that even given an order of trustworthiness on sources, it is a non-trivial exercise to resolve all kinds of conflict that may arise. In the talk I will propose a method that settles conflicts in the general case where there are arbitrarily many sources that have supplied arbitrarily many, possibly conflicting, pieces of information. All that will be assumed is that there is a very weak ordering on sets of sources. It will be shown how the method generates structures well-known in the literature on non-monotonic logic and belief revision.