Abstract
When a belief set is contracted only some beliefs are eligible for removal. By introducing eligibility for removal as a new semantic primitive for contraction and combining it with epistemic entrenchment we get a contraction operator with a number of interesting properties. By placing some minimal constraint upon eligibility we get an explicit contraction recipe that exactly characterises the so called interpolation thesis, a thesis that states upper and lower bounds for the amount of information to be given up in contraction. As a result we drop the controversial property of recovery. By placing additional constraints on eligibility we get representation theorems for a number of contraction operators of varying strength. In addition it is shown that recovery contraction is a special case that we get if eligibility is explicitly constructed in terms of logical relevance.
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Cantwell, J. Eligible Contraction. Studia Logica 73, 167–182 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022975611979
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022975611979