703 research outputs found
On the Invariance of G\"odel's Second Theorem with regard to Numberings
The prevalent interpretation of G\"odel's Second Theorem states that a
sufficiently adequate and consistent theory does not prove its consistency. It
is however not entirely clear how to justify this informal reading, as the
formulation of the underlying mathematical theorem depends on several arbitrary
formalisation choices. In this paper I examine the theorem's dependency
regarding G\"odel numberings. I introduce deviant numberings, yielding
provability predicates satisfying L\"ob's conditions, which result in provable
consistency sentences. According to the main result of this paper however,
these "counterexamples" do not refute the theorem's prevalent interpretation,
since once a natural class of admissible numberings is singled out, invariance
is maintained.Comment: Forthcoming in The Review of Symbolic Logi
Global semantic typing for inductive and coinductive computing
Inductive and coinductive types are commonly construed as ontological
(Church-style) types, denoting canonical data-sets such as natural numbers,
lists, and streams. For various purposes, notably the study of programs in the
context of global semantics, it is preferable to think of types as semantical
properties (Curry-style). Intrinsic theories were introduced in the late 1990s
to provide a purely logical framework for reasoning about programs and their
semantic types. We extend them here to data given by any combination of
inductive and coinductive definitions. This approach is of interest because it
fits tightly with syntactic, semantic, and proof theoretic fundamentals of
formal logic, with potential applications in implicit computational complexity
as well as extraction of programs from proofs. We prove a Canonicity Theorem,
showing that the global definition of program typing, via the usual (Tarskian)
semantics of first-order logic, agrees with their operational semantics in the
intended model. Finally, we show that every intrinsic theory is interpretable
in a conservative extension of first-order arithmetic. This means that
quantification over infinite data objects does not lead, on its own, to
proof-theoretic strength beyond that of Peano Arithmetic. Intrinsic theories
are perfectly amenable to formulas-as-types Curry-Howard morphisms, and were
used to characterize major computational complexity classes Their extensions
described here have similar potential which has already been applied
Inheritance as Implicit Coercion
We present a method for providing semantic interpretations for languages with a type system featuring inheritance polymorphism. Our approach is illustrated on an extension of the language Fun of Cardelli and Wegner, which we interpret via a translation into an extended polymorphic lambda calculus. Our goal is to interpret inheritances in Fun via coercion functions which are definable in the target of the translation. Existing techniques in the theory of semantic domains can be then used to interpret the extended polymorphic lambda calculus, thus providing many models for the original language. This technique makes it possible to model a rich type discipline which includes parametric polymorphism and recursive types as well as inheritance.
A central difficulty in providing interpretations for explicit type disciplines featuring inheritance in the sense discussed in this paper arises from the fact that programs can type-check in more than one way. Since interpretations follow the type-checking derivations, coherence theorems are required: that is, one must prove that the meaning of a program does not depend on the way it was type-checked. The proof of such theorems for our proposed interpretation are the basic technical results of this paper. Interestingly, proving coherence in the presence of recursive types, variants, and abstract types forced us to reexamine fundamental equational properties that arise in proof theory (in the form of commutative reductions) and domain theory (in the form of strict vs. non-strict functions)
Implicit complexity for coinductive data: a characterization of corecurrence
We propose a framework for reasoning about programs that manipulate
coinductive data as well as inductive data. Our approach is based on using
equational programs, which support a seamless combination of computation and
reasoning, and using productivity (fairness) as the fundamental assertion,
rather than bi-simulation. The latter is expressible in terms of the former. As
an application to this framework, we give an implicit characterization of
corecurrence: a function is definable using corecurrence iff its productivity
is provable using coinduction for formulas in which data-predicates do not
occur negatively. This is an analog, albeit in weaker form, of a
characterization of recurrence (i.e. primitive recursion) in [Leivant, Unipolar
induction, TCS 318, 2004].Comment: In Proceedings DICE 2011, arXiv:1201.034
Implicit Commitment in a General Setting
G\"odel's Incompleteness Theorems suggest that no single formal system can
capture the entirety of one's mathematical beliefs, while pointing at a
hierarchy of systems of increasing logical strength that make progressively
more explicit those \emph{implicit} assumptions. This notion of \emph{implicit
commitment} motivates directly or indirectly several research programmes in
logic and the foundations of mathematics; yet there hasn't been a direct
logical analysis of the notion of implicit commitment itself. In a recent
paper, \L elyk and Nicolai carried out an initial assessment of this project by
studying necessary conditions for implicit commitments; from seemingly weak
assumptions on implicit commitments of an arithmetical system , it can be
derived that a uniform reflection principle for -- stating that all
numerical instances of theorems of are true -- must be contained in 's
implicit commitments. This study gave rise to unexplored research avenues and
open questions. This paper addresses the main ones. We generalize this basic
framework for implicit commitments along two dimensions: in terms of iterations
of the basic implicit commitment operator, and via a study of implicit
commitments of theories in arbitrary first-order languages, not only couched in
an arithmetical language
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