Scientific Reasoning and Belief Structure

摘要

For explaming theory change, it is important to be able to express which theory in believed to he fundamental and winch theory in thought to be true. To achieve this expressive power, I propose theory of belief structures (TBS) that describes be-lief states not in, terms of a set of sentences but by a structure. The dominant formal approach of be-lief revision. the AGM theory, adopts a conservative strategy. However, this does not always conform to the praxes of scientists. Contrarily, TBS admits lo taking a progressive strategy and can describe dif-ferent kinds of belief states To demonstrate the de-scriptive power of TBS. it is applied to a description of change in astronomical theory.