Syntactic Completeness of Proper Display Calculi

Abstract

A recent strand of research in structural proof theory aims at exploring the notion of analytic calculi (i.e., those calculi that support general and modular proof-strategies for cut elimination) and at identifying classes of logics that can be captured in terms of these calculi. In this context, Wansing introduced the notion of proper display calculi as one possible design framework for proof calculi in which the analyticity desiderata are realized in a particularly transparent way. Recently, the theory of properly displayable logics (i.e., those logics that can be equivalently presented with some proper display calculus) has been developed in connection with generalized Sahlqvist theory (a.k.a. unified correspondence). Specifically, properly displayable logics have been syntactically characterized as those axiomatized by analytic inductive axioms , which can be equivalently and algorithmically transformed into analytic structural rules so the resulting proper display calculi enjoy a set of basic properties: soundness, completeness, conservativity, cut elimination, and the subformula property. In this context, the proof that the given calculus is complete w.r.t. the original logic is usually carried out syntactically , i.e., by showing that a (cut-free) derivation exists of each given axiom of the logic in the basic system to which the analytic structural rules algorithmically generated from the given axiom have been added. However, so far, this proof strategy for syntactic completeness has been implemented on a case-by-case base and not in general. In this article, we address this gap by proving syntactic completeness for properly displayable logics in any normal (distributive) lattice expansion signature. Specifically, we show that for every analytic inductive axiom a cut-free derivation can be effectively generated that has a specific shape, referred to as pre-normal form .