 To understand the rival amendments proposed, return to our  section 5  discussion of communication, and imagine that the individuals coordinating doxastic states are an earlier and later edition of the same agent. In linguistic communication we usually think of a speaker’s utterance as directly producing a single doxastic state in the addressee, then indirectly producing knock-on addressee states which follow from that one. Communication from an earlier to a later self doesn’t have this bottleneck structure; the present me directly inherited a whole slew of doxastic states from myself a moment ago. Still, in formal updating it’s useful to start by aligning just one of the later agent’s states with a state of the earlier agent, then to work out the rest of the later agent’s states from that one.