Theory Reduction, theory revision, and retranslation

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to retranslation, the third and final step of the theory reduction approach to solving theory revision problems [3,4]. Retranslation involves putting a modified operationalized, or reduced, version of the desired revised theory back into the entire language of the original theory. This step is desirable for a number of reasons, not least of which is the need to compress what are generally very large reduced theories into much smaller, and thus, more efficiently evaluated, unreduced theories. Empirical results for the retranslation method are presented.