The article approaches cut elimination from a new angle. On the basis of an arbitrary inference relation among logically atomic formulae, an inference relation on a language possessing logical operators is defined by means of inductive clauses similar to the operator-introducing rules of a cut-free intuitionistic sequent calculus. The logical terminology of the richer language is not uniquely specified, but assumed to satisfy certain conditions of a general nature, allowing for, but not requiring, the existence of infinite conjunctions and disjunctions. (...) We investigate to what extent structural properties of the given atomic relation are preserved through the extension to the full language. While closure under the Cut rule narrowly construed is not in general thus preserved, two properties jointly amounting to closure under the ordinary structural rules, including Cut, are. -/- Attention is then narrowed down to the special case of a standard first-order language, where a similar result is obtained also for closure under substitution of terms for individual parameters. Taken together, the three preservation results imply the familiar cut-elimination theorem for pure first-order intuitionistic sequent calculus. -/- In the interest of conceptual economy, all deducibility relations are specified purely inductively, rather than in terms of the existence of formal proofs of any kind. (shrink)

We offer an alternative approach to the existing methods for intuitionistic formalization of reasoning about probability. In terms of Kripke models, each possible world is equipped with a structure of the form $$\langle H, \mu \rangle $$ that needs not be a probability space. More precisely, though H needs not be a Boolean algebra, the corresponding monotone function (we call it measure) $$\mu : H \longrightarrow [0,1]_{\mathbb {Q}}$$ satisfies the following condition: if $$\alpha $$, $$\beta $$, $$\alpha \wedge \beta $$, (...) $$\alpha \vee \beta \in H$$, then $$\mu (\alpha \vee \beta ) = \mu (\alpha ) + \mu (\beta ) - \mu (\alpha \wedge \beta )$$. Since the range of $$\mu $$ is the set $$[0,1]_{\mathbb {Q}}$$ of rational numbers from the real unit interval, our logic is not compact. In order to obtain a strong complete axiomatization, we introduce an infinitary inference rule with a countable set of premises. The main technical results are the proofs of strong completeness and decidability. (shrink)

By a classifying topos for a first-order theory , we mean a topos such that, for any topos models of in correspond exactly to open geometric morphisms → . We show that not every first-order theory has a classifying topos in this sense, but we characterize those which do by an appropriate ‘smallness condition’, and we show that every Grothendieck topos arises as the classifying topos of such a theory. We also show that every first-order theory has a conservative extension (...) to one which possesses a classifying topos, and we obtain a Heyting-valued completeness theorem for infinitary first-order logic. (shrink)