Classical proof forestry

AbstractClassical proof forests are a proof formalism for first-order classical logic based on Herbrand’s Theorem and backtracking games in the style of Coquand. First described by Miller in a cut-free setting as an economical representation of first-order and higher-order classical proof, defining features of the forests are a strict focus on witnessing terms for quantifiers and the absence of inessential structure, or ‘bureaucracy’.This paper presents classical proof forests as a graphical proof formalism and investigates the possibility of composing forests by cut-elimination. Cut-reduction steps take the form of a local rewrite relation that arises from the structure of the forests in a natural way. Yet reductions, which are significantly different from those of the sequent calculus, are combinatorially intricate and do not exclude the possibility of infinite reduction traces, of which an example is given.Cut-elimination, in the form of a weak normalisation theorem, is obtained using a modified version of the rewrite relation inspired by the game-theoretic interpretation of the forests. It is conjectured that the modified reduction relation is, in fact, strongly normalising

On the Herbrand content of LK

We present a structural representation of the Herbrand content of LK-proofs with cuts of complexity prenex Sigma-2/Pi-2. The representation takes the form of a typed non-deterministic tree grammar of order 2 which generates a finite language of first-order terms that appear in the Herbrand expansions obtained through cut-elimination. In particular, for every Gentzen-style reduction between LK-proofs we study the induced grammars and classify the cases in which language equality and inclusion hold.Comment: In Proceedings CL&C 2016, arXiv:1606.0582

Expansion Trees with Cut

Herbrand's theorem is one of the most fundamental insights in logic. From the syntactic point of view it suggests a compact representation of proofs in classical first- and higher-order logic by recording the information which instances have been chosen for which quantifiers, known in the literature as expansion trees. Such a representation is inherently analytic and hence corresponds to a cut-free sequent calculus proof. Recently several extensions of such proof representations to proofs with cut have been proposed. These extensions are based on graphical formalisms similar to proof nets and are limited to prenex formulas. In this paper we present a new approach that directly extends expansion trees by cuts and covers also non-prenex formulas. We describe a cut-elimination procedure for our expansion trees with cut that is based on the natural reduction steps. We prove that it is weakly normalizing using methods from the epsilon-calculus

A Systematic Approach to Canonicity in the Classical Sequent Calculus

International audienceThe sequent calculus is often criticized for requiring proofs to contain large amounts of low-level syntactic details that can obscure the essence of a given proof. Because each inference rule introduces only a single connective, sequent proofs can separate closely related steps---such as instantiating a block of quantifiers---by irrelevant noise. Moreover, the sequential nature of sequent proofs forces proof steps that are syntactically non-interfering and permutable to nevertheless be written in some arbitrary order. The sequent calculus thus lacks a notion of canonicity: proofs that should be considered essentially the same may not have a common syntactic form. To fix this problem, many researchers have proposed replacing the sequent calculus with proof structures that are more parallel or geometric. Proof-nets, matings, and atomic flows are examples of such revolutionary formalisms. We propose, instead, an evolutionary approach to recover canonicity within the sequent calculus, which we illustrate for classical first-order logic. The essential element of our approach is the use of a multi-focused sequent calculus as the means of abstracting away the details from classical cut-free sequent proofs. We show that, among the multi-focused proofs, the maximally multi-focused proofs that make the foci as parallel as possible are canonical. Moreover, such proofs are isomorphic to expansion proofs---a well known, minimalistic, and parallel generalization of Herbrand disjunctions---for classical first-order logic. This technique is a systematic way to recover the desired essence of any sequent proof without abandoning the sequent calculus

Herbrand-Confluence for Cut Elimination in Classical First Order Logic

We consider cut-elimination in the sequent calculus for classical first-order logic. It is well known that this system, in its most general form, is neither confluent nor strongly normalizing. In this work we take a coarser (and mathematically more realistic) look at cut-free proofs. We analyze which witnesses they choose for which quantifiers, or in other words: we only consider the Herbrand-disjunction of a cut-free proof. Our main theorem is a confluence result for a natural class of proofs: all (possibly infinitely many) normal forms of the non-erasing reduction lead to the same Herbrand-disjunction

Herbrand-Confluence for Cut Elimination in Classical First Order Logic

International audienceWe consider cut-elimination in the sequent calculus for classical first-order logic. It is well known that this system, in its most general form, is neither confluent nor strongly normalizing. In this work we take a coarser (and mathematically more realistic) look at cut-free proofs. We analyze which witnesses they choose for which quantifiers, or in other words: we only consider the Herbrand-disjunction of a cut-free proof. Our main theorem is a confluence result for a natural class of proofs: all (possibly infinitely many) normal forms of the non-erasing reduction lead to the same Herbrand-disjunction