Louis Narens

Department of Cognitive Sciences
University of California, Irvine
92717 Irvine, CA, USA

[email protected]

A theory of belief is axiomatized in terms of a qualitative binary relation that may be interpreted as “the degree of belief of the conditional event AjB is greater than the degree of belief of the conditional event CjD". Repre-sentation theorems establish that the qualitative axiom-atization is a proper generalization of a theory of con-ditional probability. As a generalization, it has various interpretations, including one where uncertainty is mea-sured in terms of two dimensions – one being probability (as usually defined) and the other a dimension called 'ambiguity'. There are strong links between this theory of belief and the descriptive theory of probability judgments known as "Support Theory".