Intuitionistic Completeness of First-Order Logic

We establish completeness for intuitionistic first-order logic, iFOL, showing that is a formula is provable if and only if it is uniformly valid under the Brouwer Heyting Kolmogorov (BHK) semantics, the intended semantics of iFOL. Our proof is intuitionistic and provides an effective procedure Prf that converts uniform evidence into a formal first-order proof. We have implemented Prf . Uniform validity is defined using the intersection operator as a universal quantifier over the domain of discourse and atomic predicates. Formulas of iFOL that are uniformly valid are also intuitionistically valid, but not conversely. Our strongest result requires the Fan Theorem; it can also be proved classically by showing that Prf terminates using K¨onig’s Theorem. The fundamental idea behind our completeness theorem is that a single evidence term evd witnesses the uniform validity of a minimal logic formula F. Finding even one uniform realizer guarantees validity because Prf (F, evd) builds a first-order proof of F, establishing its uniform validity and providing a purely logical normalized realizer. We establish completeness for iFOL as follows. Friedman showed that iFOL can be embedded in minimal logic (mFOL). By his transformation, mapping formula A to F r(A). If A is uniformly valid, then so is F r(A), and by our Basic Completeness result, we can find a proof of F r(A) in minimal logic. Then we prove A from F r(A) in intuitionistic logic by a proof procedure fixed in advance. Our result resolves an open question posed by Beth in 1947

An analysis of the constructive content of Henkin's proof of G\"odel's completeness theorem

G{\"o}del's completeness theorem for classical first-order logic is one of the most basic theorems of logic. Central to any foundational course in logic, it connects the notion of valid formula to the notion of provable formula.We survey a few standard formulations and proofs of the completeness theorem before focusing on the formal description of a slight modification of Henkin's proof within intuitionistic second-order arithmetic.It is standard in the context of the completeness of intuitionistic logic with respect to various semantics such as Kripke or Beth semantics to follow the Curry-Howard correspondence and to interpret the proofs of completeness as programs which turn proofs of validity for these semantics into proofs of derivability.We apply this approach to Henkin's proof to phrase it as a program which transforms any proof of validity with respect to Tarski semantics into a proof of derivability.By doing so, we hope to shed an effective light on the relation between Tarski semantics and syntax: proofs of validity are syntactic objects with which we can compute.Comment: R{\'e}dig{\'e} en 4 {\'e}tapes: 2013, 2016, 2022, 202

An Application of Constructive Completeness.

this paper, we explore one possible effective version of this theorem, that uses topological models in a point-free setting, following Sambin [11]. The truth-values, instead of being simply booleans, can be arbitrary open of a given topological space. There are two advantages with considering this more abstract notion of model. The first is that, by using formal topology, we get a remarkably simple completeness proof; it seems indeed simpler than the usual classical completeness proof. The second is that this completeness proof is now constructive and elementary. In particular, it does not use any impredicativity and can be formalized in intuitionistic type theory; this is of importance for us, since we want to develop model theory in a computer system for type theory. Formal topology has been developed in the type theory implementation ALF [1] by Cederquist [2] and the completeness proof we use has been checked in ALF by Persson [9]. In view of the extreme simplicity of this proof, it might be feared that it has no interesting applications. We show that this is not the case by analysing a conservativity theorem due to Dragalin [4] concerning a non-standard extension of Heyting arithmetic. We can transpose directly the usual model theoretic conservativity argument, that we sketched above, in this framework. It seems likely that a direct syntactical proof of this result would have to be more involved. The first part of this paper presents a definition of topological models, Sambin's completeness proof, and an alternative completeness proof; we also discuss how Beth models relate to our approach. The second part shows how to use this in order to give a proof of Dragalin's conservativity result; our proof is different from his and, we believe, simpler. In [8] a stronger ..