Must we change the linguistic framework when we change our minds?

Gricean Belief Change
Authors:Delgrande, James P
Nayak, Abhaya C
Pagnucco, Maurice
Source:Studia Logica: An International Journal for Symbolic Logic, 79(1), 97-113. 17 p. February 2005.
Document Type:Journal Article
Subjects:BELIEF
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE
LOGIC
REVISION
SEMANTICS
Persons as Subjects:GRICE, H PAUL
Abstract:One of the standard principles of rationality guiding traditional accounts of belief change is the principle of minimal change: a reasoner's belief corpus should be modified in a minimal fashion when assimilating new information. This rationality principle has stood belief change in good stead. However, it does not deal properly with all belief change scenarios. We introduce a novel account of belief change motivated by one of Grice's maxims of conversational implicature: the reasoner's belief corpus is modified in a minimal fashion to assimilate exactly the new information.