Recovery recovered (Q1568716): Difference between revisions

In the logic of belief change, the postulate of recovery states that if a belief state is contracted to eliminate a proposition, and the same proposition is then added back in, we regain all the elements of the original belief state. It is the most controversial of the AGM postulates for contraction, and several authors (notably Sven Ove Hansson and Issac Levi) have given examples where its application appears quite counter-intuitive. In a recent discussion of the question, the reviewer saw the discrepancy as arising from AGM's identification of belief states as sets of propositions, closed under classical consequence, rather than as more complex items equipped with traces of justification or acquisition [see ``On the force of some apparent counterexamples to recovery'', in: E. Garzón Valdés et al. (eds.), Normative systems in legal and moral theory: Festschrift for Carlos Alchourrón and Eugenio Bulygin, Berlin: Duncker \& Humblot (1997)]. In the paper under review, the author takes a different approach. He argues that in real life examples, casual identification of the belief that we want to give up is frequently elliptical. In the alleged counterexamples to recovery we are really intending to eliminate more than the displayed proposition; how much more is determined by conversational context. Reviewer's comment: Although different, these two analyses may perhaps have some common ground. For when we say that we are discarding a belief, conversational context may indicate that we extend to drop it and all other beliefs that depend on it, under some history or structure of justification of the belief state.