A SHORT NOTE ON INTUITIONISTIC PROPOSITIONAL LOGIC WITH MULTIPLE CONCLUSIONS

Resumo

A common misconception among logicians is to think that intuitionism is necessarily tied-up with single conclusion (sequent or Natural Deduction) calculi. Single conclusion calculi can be used to model intuitionism and they are convenient, but by no means are they necessary. This has been shown by such influential textbook authors as Kleene, Takeuti and Dummett, to cite only three. If single conclusions are not necessary, how do we guarantee that only intuitionistic derivations are allowed? Traditionally one insists on restrictions on particular rules: implication right, negation right and universal quantification right are required to be single conclusion rules. In this note we show that instead of a cardinality restriction such as oneconclusion-only, we can use a notion of dependency between formulae to enforce the constructive character of derivations. The system we obtain, called FIL for full intuitionistic logic, satisfies basic properties such as soundness, completeness and cut elimination. We present two motivating applications of FIL and discuss some future work.