Reflecting stationary sets and successors of singular cardinals

REF is the statement that every stationary subset of a cardinal reflects, unless it fails to do so for a trivial reason. The main theorem, presented in Sect. 0, is that under suitable assumptions it is consistent that REF and there is a which is ⁺ⁿ-supercompact. The main concepts defined in Sect. 1 are PT, which is a certain statement about the existence of transversals, and the bad stationary set. It is shown that supercompactness (and even the failure of PT) implies the existence of non-reflecting stationary sets. E.g., if REF then for many PT(, ₁). In Sect. 2 it is shown that Easton-support iteration of suitable Levy collapses yield a universe with REF if for every singular which is a limit of supercompacts the bad stationary set concentrates on the right cofinalities. In Sect. 3 the use of oracle c.c. (and oracle proper—see [Sh-b, Chap. IV] and [Sh 100, Sect. 4]) is adapted to replacing the diamond by the Laver diamond. Using this, a universe as needed in Sect. 2 is forced, where one starts, and ends, with a universe with a proper class of supercompacts. In Sect. 4 bad sets are handled in ZFC. For a regular {<⁺ : cf<} is good. It is proved in ZFC that if=cf>₁ then {<⁺ : cf<} is the union of sets on which there are squares.