A major purpose of this paper is to show the broad import and applicability of the theory of probability as proposed by de Finetti, which differs radically from the usual one (based on a measure-theoretic framework). In particular, with reference to a coherent conditional probability, we prove a characterization theorem, which provides also a useful algorithm for checking coherence of a given assessment. Moreover it allows to deepen and generalise in useful directions de Finetti’s extension theorem (dubbed as “the fundamental theorem of probability”), emphasising its operational aspects in many significant applications.
Some results on coherence in probabilistic and in possibilistic frameworks are presented in order to deal with nonmonotonic reasoning. Moreover, we extend these results to conditional decomposable measures. We deal with entailment and prove that it satisfies the axiomatization of System P by referring to conditional necessities or to specific conditional decomposable measures (which include conditional probability). Finally, we study some aspects concerning a notion of irrelevance.
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