Prolegomenon to a theory of conservative belief revision

A standard intuition underlying traditional accounts of belief change is the principle of minimal change. In this paper we introduce a novel account of belief change in which the agent's belief state is modified minimally to incorporate exactly the new information. Thus a revision by p V q will result in a new belief state in which p V q is believed, but a stronger proposition (such as p A q) is not, regardless of the initial form of the belief state.