• Korean Journal of Logic
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.307-335
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• 2015

An important component in Prawitz's and Dummett's proof-theoretic accounts of validity is the condition for validity of open arguments. According to their accounts, roughly, an open argument is valid if there is an effective method for transforming valid arguments for its premises into a valid argument for its conclusion. Although their conditions look similar to the proof condition for implication in the BHK explanation, their conditions differ from the BHK account in an important respect. If the premises of an open argument are undecidable in an appropriate sense, then that argument is trivially valid according to Prawitz's and Dummett's definitions. I call this 'the triviality problem'. After a brief exposition of their accounts of proof-theoretic validity, I discuss triviality problems raised by undecidable atomic sentences and by Godel sentence. On this basis, I suggest an emendation of Prawitz's definition of validity of argument.

• Journal of the Korean Mathematical Society
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• v.54 no.5
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• pp.1521-1536
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• 2017

This paper introduces a representation style of variable binding using dependent types when formalizing meta-theoretic properties. The style we present is a variation of the Coquand-McKinna-Pollack's locally-named representation. The main characteristic is the use of dependent families in defining expressions such as terms and formulas. In this manner, we can handle many syntactic elements, among which wellformedness, provability, soundness, and completeness are critical, in a compact manner. Another point of our paper is to investigate the roles of free variables and constants. Our idea is that fresh constants can entirely play the role of free variables in formalizing meta-theories of first-order predicate logic. In order to show the feasibility of our idea, we formalized the soundness and completeness of LJT with respect to Kripke semantics using the proof assistant Coq, where LJT is the intuitionistic first-order predicate calculus. The proof assistant Coq supports all the functionalities we need: intentional type theory, dependent types, inductive families, and simultaneous substitution.