SVEN-OVE HANSSON and HANS ROTT BEYOND RECOVERY? A REPLY TO TENNANT A Critical Discussion ABSTRACT. In his paper ‘Changing the Theory of Theory Change: Reply to My Critics’, N. Tennant (1997b) reacts to the critical reception of an earlier article of his. The present note rectifies some of the most serious misrepresentations in Tennant’s reply. In Hansson and Rott (1995), it is shown that Tennant (1994), although written with the intention of exposing the weaknesses of the Alchourrón– Gärdenfors–Makinson model of belief revision (AGM model for short), failed to do so due to a series of mistakes and misrepresentations. Tennant (1997b) replied to this and to a similar criticism by Makinson (1995). In this note we want to draw attention to the fact that in his reply, Tennant still (1) does not even begin to relate his arguments to previous, more thorough treatments of the same issues; (2) attributes to himself what are in fact standard results and constructions in belief revision theory; and (3) makes elementary mistakes of logic. Ad (1). In Hansson and Rott (1995), it was pointed out that Tennant’s criticism of the recovery postulate adds nothing new to the criticism that was voiced earlier by, e.g., Makinson (1987), Fuhrmann (1991), Hans- son (1991, 1992), Levi (1991), Lindström and Rabinowicz (1991), and Niederée (1991). In contrast to Tennant, these authors neither claim that recovery is the ‘main foundation stone’ of the AGM theory of belief re- vision nor that it can be ‘shown’ to be generally false. 1 But, again in contrast to Tennant, they constructively show how to accommodate these arguments and avoid recovery in a precisely defined framework that is still faithful to many of the basic ideas of AGM. Tennant’s only comment on this is: “if other writers had indeed already made point (1) [that recovery can be shown to be false] before me, the fact remains that these writers did not follow up where their counterexemplary intuitions led them . . . ” (1997b, p. 573, our emphasis). It is difficult to believe that this could have been written by someone who has read the above-mentioned papers and considered the arguments advanced in them. Erkenntnis 49: 387–392, 1998. © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.