Belief contraction without recovery (Q1181487)

The focus of this paper is the recovery postulate for belief revision suggested by Alchourrón, Gärdenfors and Makinson. The author replaces recovery by the postulate of core-retainment, which requires that if a sentence \(x\) is excluded from a belief set \(K\) when \(y\) is contracted, then \(x\) plays some role for the fact that \(K\) implies \(y\). Even though this postulate seems weaker than recovery, the author proves that they are basically equivalent when the belief sets are logically closed. Instead the author studies contractions of belief bases, i.e. non-closed belief sets, that do not satisfy recovery. He proves a representation theorem for a contraction method for belief bases, called preservative withdrawal, which, among other postulates, satisfies core-retainment.