Recovery and epistemic residue (Q1961951)

`Recovery' is a property of partial meet contraction on belief sets that are closed under classical consequence, and it figures as one of the standard `postulates' that together provide a syntactic characterisation of the class of all partial meet contraction operations. Of all those postulates, it is the one most open to query from an intuitive point of view, and a number of authors have produced intuitive counterexamples. In recent papers, S. Glaister and the reviewer have each (separately and rather differently) attempted to meet such criticisms, arguing that the alleged counterexamples show rather less than has been claimed for them. In the paper under review, the author summarises and discusses these `arguments for the defence'. He concludes that when applied to closed sets of formulae, recovery is reasonable as an idealisation -- where that term is understood in the sense of `a useful over-simplification' rather than as meaning a standard of excellence to be emulated.