Some Representation Theorems for Recovering Contraction Relations

One of the important topics in the study of contraction inference relations is to establish the representation theorems for them. Various methods have been employed for giving representation of a broad class of contraction operations. However, there was not any canonical approach to dealing with the representation results for the contraction relations in the literature. Recently, in order to obtain the representation result for recovering contraction inference relations satisfying the condition weak conjunctive inclusion (wci), a notion of an image structure associated with the canonical epistemic state has been introduced. Based on the image structure, this paper establishes three representation results for recovering contraction inference relations which satisfy the conditions CL, CR1 and DR^* respectively by the standard epistemic AGM states.A unique technique and uniform proofs to represent these contraction relations are adopted, which could overcome the core objection in previous description of contraction relations. The paper shows as well that the image structure and canonical epistemic states can be used not only to get the representation result for wci-recovering contraction relation, but also to provide semantic characterizations for a wide range of recovering contraction relations.