Thomas Piecha

This open access book is a superb collection of some fifteen chapters inspired by Schroeder-Heister's groundbreaking work, written by leading experts in the field, plus an extensive autobiography and comments on the various contributions by Schroeder-Heister himself. For several decades, Peter Schroeder-Heister has been a central figure in proof-theoretic semantics, a field of study situated at the interface of logic, theoretical computer science, natural-language semantics, and the philosophy of language. The chapters of which this book is composed discuss the subject from a rich variety of angles, including the history of logic, the proper interpretation of logical validity, natural deduction rules, the notions of harmony and of synonymy, the structure of proofs, the logical status of equality, intentional phenomena, and the proof theory of second-order arithmetic. All chapters relate directly to questions that have driven Schroeder-Heister's own research agenda and to which he has made seminal contributions. The extensive autobiographical chapter not only provides a fascinating overview of Schroeder-Heister's career and the evolution of his academic interests but also constitutes a contribution to the recent history of logic in its own right, painting an intriguing picture of the philosophical, logical, and mathematical institutional landscape in Germany and elsewhere since the early 1970s. The papers collected in this book are illuminatingly put into a unified perspective by Schroeder-Heister's comments at the end of the book. Both graduate students and established researchers in the field will find this book an excellent resource for future work in proof-theoretic semantics and related areas.

In proof-theoretic semantics, the validity of atomic formulas is defined as their derivability in systems of atomic rules. We distinguish two types of such systems and two variants of semantics of formulas, one based on introduction rules for logical constants and one based on elimination rules. We thus define four semantics with their respective consequence relations. As these are not necessarily closed under substitution of arbitrary formulas for atoms, we consider the substitution-closed subsets of these four consequence relations in addition. We show which logics, in the sense of formal systems, are complete for seven of these notions. This systematizes in one place four previous results with three new results. For the semantics based on elimination rules intuitionistic or classical logic is complete, depending on the type of atomic rules, whereas the semantics based on introduction rules characterize intermediate logics. This answers several open questions about the main notions of proof-theoretic validity, although for one semantics of the introduction rule type we can only make a conjecture about possible logics. Further notions of proof-theoretic validity are suggested by considering alternative systems of atomic rules from the perspective of logic programming.

We give an overview of completeness and incompleteness results within proof-theoretic semantics. Completeness of intuitionistic first-order logic for certain notions of validity in proof-theoretic semantics has been conjectured by Prawitz. For the kind of semantics proposed by him, this conjecture is still undecided. For certain variants of proof-theoretic semantics the completeness question is settled, including a positive result for classical logic. For intuitionistic logic there are positive as well as negative completeness results, depending on which variant of semantics is considered. Further results have been obtained for certain fragments of first-order languages.

We outline Karl Popper’s theory of deduction, which he developed in the 1940s. In his theory it is assumed that a consequence relation is given or otherwise constructed by postulation. Logical operations, which may be available in this consequence relation, are then characterized by means of relational definitions, and logical operators are introduced as names for these operations by means of inferential definitions. Using logically structured sentences thus introduced, the inference laws for them are immediately obtained from the inferential definitions.

Atomic systems are systems of rules containing only atomic formulas. In proof-theoretic semantics for minimal and intuitionistic logic they are used as the base case in an inductive definition of validity. We compare two different approaches to atomic systems. The first approach is compatible with an interpretation of atomic systems as representations of states of knowledge. The second takes atomic systems to be definitions of atomic formulas. The two views lead to different notions of derivability for atomic formulas, and consequently to different notions of proof-theoretic validity. In the first approach, validity is stable in the sense that for atomic formulas logical consequence and derivability coincide for any given atomic system. In the second approach this is not the case. This indicates that atomic systems as definitions, which determine the meaning of atomic sentences, might not be the proper basis for proof-theoretic validity, or conversely, that standard notions of proof-theoretic validity are not appropriate for definitional rule systems.

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.

Prawitz proposed certain notions of proof-theoretic validity and conjectured that intuitionistic logic is complete for them [11, 12]. Considering propositional logic, we present a general framework of five abstract conditions which any proof-theoretic semantics should obey. Then we formulate several more specific conditions under which the intuitionistic propositional calculus turns out to be semantically incomplete. Here a crucial role is played by the generalized disjunction principle. Turning to concrete semantics, we show that prominent proposals, including Prawitz’s, satisfy at least one of these conditions, thus rendering IPC semantically incomplete for them. Only for Goldfarb’s [1] proof-theoretic semantics, which deviates from standard approaches, IPC turns out to be complete. Overall, these results show that basic ideas of proof-theoretic semantics for propositional logic are not captured by IPC.

Several proof-theoretic notions of validity have been proposed in the literature, for which completeness of intuitionistic logic has been conjectured. We define validity for intuitionistic propositional logic in a way which is common to many of these notions, emphasizing that an appropriate notion of validity must be closed under substitution. In this definition we consider atomic systems whose rules are not only production rules, but may include rules that allow one to discharge assumptions. Our central result shows that Harrop’s rule is valid under substitution, which refutes the completeness conjecture for intuitionistic logic

The BHK interpretation of logical constants is analyzed in terms of a systematic account given by Prawitz, resulting in a reformulation of the BHK interpretation in which the assertability of atomic propositions is determined by Post systems. It is shown that the reformulated BHK interpretation renders more propositions assertable than are provable in intuitionistic propositional logic. Mints’ law is examined as an example of such a proposition. Intuitionistic propositional logic would thus have to be considered incomplete. We conclude with a discussion on the adequacy of the BHK interpretation of implication.

Karl Popper developed a theory of deductive logic in the late 1940s. In his approach, logic is a metalinguistic theory of deducibility relations that are based on certain purely structural rules. Logical constants are then characterized in terms of deducibility relations. Characterizations of this kind are also called inferential definitions by Popper. In this paper, we expound his theory and elaborate some of his ideas and results that in some cases were only sketched by him. Our focus is on Popper's notion of duality, his theory of modalities, and his treatment of different kinds of negation. This allows us to show how his works on logic anticipate some later developments and discussions in philosophical logic, pertaining to trivializing connectives, the duality of logical constants, dual-intuitionistic logic, the conservativeness of language extensions, the existence of a bi-intuitionistic logic, the non-logicality of minimal negation, and to the problem of logicality in general.

The inversion principle for logical rules expresses a relationship between introduction and elimination rules for logical constants. Hallnäs & Schroeder-Heister proposed the principle of definitional reflection, which embodies basic ideas of inversion in the more general context of clausal definitions. For the context of admissibility statements, this has been further elaborated by Schroeder-Heister . Using the framework of definitional reflection and its admissibility interpretation, we show that, in the sequent calculus of minimal propositional logic, the left introduction rules are admissible when the right introduction rules are taken as the definitions of the logical constants and vice versa. This generalizes the well-known relationship between introduction and elimination rules in natural deduction to the framework of the sequent calculus