Representing Model Theory in a Type-Theoretical Logical Framework

Abstract

AbstractWe give a comprehensive formal representation of first-order logic using the recently developed module system for the Twelf implementation of the Edinburgh Logical Framework LF. The module system places strong emphasis on signature morphisms as the main primitive concept, which makes it particularly useful to reason about structural translations, which occur frequently in proof and model theory.Syntax and proof theory are encoded in the usual way using LF's higher order abstract syntax and judgments-as-types paradigm, but using the module system to treat all connectives and quantifiers independently. The difficulty is to reason about the model theory, for which the mathematical foundation in which the models are expressed must be encoded itself. We choose a variant of Martin-Löf's type theory as this foundation and use it to axiomatize first-order model theoretic semantics. Then we can encode the soundness proof as a signature morphism from the proof theory to the model theory. We extend our results to models given in terms of set theory using an encoding of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory in LF and giving a signature morphism from Martin-Löf type theory into it. These encodings can be checked mechanically by Twelf.Our results demonstrate the feasibility of comprehensively formalizing large scale representation theorems and thus promise significant future applications