Theories for belief revision have been studied by philosophers and logicians as well as cognitive scientists and social scientists. While a lot of work in the former group investigates how people should change their minds, the latter asks how people actually do change their minds. A challenge in this active area of research is to bridge the gap between philosophical approaches and empirical evidence in the field of cognitive science and experimental psychology. In this talk, we concentrate on the problem of belief revision in rational belief systems. Such a system is a coherent theory of sentences connecting propositional and transitional beliefs. Updates of rational belief systems come in two flavors: the adding of a sentence (with or without beliefs), and the removal of a belief. We consider philosophical theories modeling rational belief revision and propose, using tools from complexity theory, how to gather evidence to support or refute such a model. |