Construct · 4 fields · 4 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, four constructs Nearest construct by meaningjustificationcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to belief is justification.
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In epistemology a belief is a mental attitude of holding a proposition to be true: it is one of the propositional attitudes, something a person either has or lacks toward a claim, and the classical project treated knowledge as belief that is both true and justified. Gettier's 1963 Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? showed by counterexample that a justified true belief can still fall short of knowledge, which reopened the question of what must be added to belief. Here a belief is a person's roughly yes-or-no attitude toward a single proposition, not a number on a probability scale, an informational state written into a software agent, or a non-additive measure over a set of hypotheses.[1]
In decision theory and economics a belief is a degree of confidence in an event written as a subjective probability, a number between zero and one that obeys the laws of probability and can be read off from the bets or choices a person is willing to make. Savage's 1954 The Foundations of Statistics derived such personal probabilities from consistent preferences and combined them with utilities to explain rational choice under uncertainty. Here a belief is a single additive number on a probability scale attached to an event, not a person's yes-or-no attitude toward a proposition, a symbol stored inside an artificial agent, or the non-additive belief function of evidence theory.[2]
In artificial intelligence and logic a belief is a sentence in an agent's belief set, the body of propositions a reasoning system currently accepts, and the central problem is how that set should change when new information arrives. Alchourrón, Gärdenfors, and Makinson's 1985 On the Logic of Theory Change gave the AGM postulates for rationally contracting and revising such a belief set while surrendering as little as possible. Here a belief is an accepted sentence in a logically closed set maintained by a machine and governed by revision rules, not a human's attitude, a subjective probability, or a numerical measure over hypotheses.[3]
In the statistics of evidence a belief function assigns to each group of hypotheses a lower measure of support built from the evidence, and, unlike an ordinary probability, it need not add up to one across a hypothesis and its negation. Dempster's 1967 Upper and Lower Probabilities Induced by a Multivalued Mapping introduced the upper and lower probabilities that Shafer later developed into the theory of belief functions. Here a belief is a non-additive set measure that records how far the evidence commits to a group of hypotheses while leaving room for ignorance, not a human attitude, a single subjective probability, or a sentence stored in a reasoning agent.[4]
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