Attempts to articulate the real meaning or ultimate significance of a famous theorem comprise a major vein of philosophical writing about mathematics. The subfield of mathematical logic has supplie...

This volume is the first ever collection devoted to the field of proof-theoretic semantics. Contributions address topics including the systematics of introduction and elimination rules and proofs of normalization, the categorial characterization of deductions, the relation between Heyting's and Gentzen's approaches to meaning, knowability paradoxes, proof-theoretic foundations of set theory, Dummett's justification of logical laws, Kreisel's theory of constructions, paradoxical reasoning, and the defence of model theory. The field of proof-theoretic semantics has existed for almost 50 years, but the term (...) itself was proposed by Schroeder-Heister in the 1980s. Proof-theoretic semantics explains the meaning of linguistic expressions in general and of logical constants in particular in terms of the notion of proof. This volume emerges from presentations at the Second International Conference on Proof-Theoretic Semantics in Tübingen in 2013, where contributing authors were asked to provide a self-contained description and analysis of a significant research question in this area. The contributions are representative of the field and should be of interest to logicians, philosophers, and mathematicians alike. (shrink)

Prawitz observed that Russell’s paradox in naive set theory yields a derivation of absurdity whose reduction sequence loops. Building on this observation, and based on numerous examples, Tennant claimed that this looping feature, or more generally, the fact that derivations of absurdity do not normalize, is characteristic of the paradoxes. Striking results by Ekman show that looping reduction sequences are already obtained in minimal propositional logic, when certain reduction steps, which are prima facie plausible, are considered in addition to the (...) standard ones. This shows that the notion of reduction is in need of clarification. Referring to the notion of identity of proofs in general proof theory, we argue that reduction steps should not merely remove redundancies, but must respect the identity of proofs. Consequentially, we propose to modify Tennant’s paradoxicality test by basing it on this refined notion of reduction. (shrink)

I give an account of proof terms for derivations in a sequent calculus for classical propositional logic. The term for a derivation δ of a sequent Σ≻Δ encodes how the premises Σ and conclusions Δ are related in δ. This encoding is many–to–one in the sense that different derivations can have the same proof term, since different derivations may be different ways of representing the same underlying connection between premises and conclusions. However, not all proof terms for a sequent Σ≻Δ (...) are the same. There may be different ways to connect those premises and conclusions. -/- Proof terms can be simplified in a process corresponding to the elimination of cut inferences in sequent derivations. However, unlike cut elimination in the sequent calculus, each proof term has a unique normal form (from which all cuts have been eliminated) and it is straightforward to show that term reduction is strongly normalising—every reduction process terminates in that unique normal form. Further- more, proof terms are invariants for sequent derivations in a strong sense—two derivations δ1 and δ2 have the same proof term if and only if some permutation of derivation steps sends δ1 to δ2 (given a relatively natural class of permutations of derivations in the sequent calculus). Since not every derivation of a sequent can be permuted into every other derivation of that sequent, proof terms provide a non-trivial account of the identity of proofs, independent of the syntactic representation of those proofs. (shrink)

Isomorphism between formulae is defined with respect to categories formalizing equality of deductions in classical propositional logic and in the multiplicative fragment of classical linear propositional logic caught by proof nets. This equality is motivated by generality of deductions. Characterizations are given for pairs of isomorphic formulae, which lead to decision procedures for this isomorphism.