A TYPE-FREE THEORY OF HALF-MONOTONE INDUCTIVE DEFINITIONS

Abstract

This paper studies an extension of inductive definitions in the context of a type-free theory. It is a kind of simultaneous inductive definition of two predicates where the defining formulas are monotone with respect to the first predicate, but not monotone with respect to the second predicate. We call this inductive definition half-monotone in analogy of Allen’s term half-positive. We can regard this definition as a variant of monotone inductive definitions by introducing a refined order between tuples of predicates. We give a general theory for half-monotone inductive definitions in a type-free first-order logic. We then give a realizability interpretation to our theory, and prove its soundness by extending Tatsuta’s technique. The mechanism of half-monotone inductive definitions is shown to be useful in interpreting many theories, including the Logical Theory of Constructions, and Martin-Löf’s Type Theory. We can also formalize the provability relation “a term p is a proof of a proposition P” naturally. As an application of this formalization, several techniques of program/proof-improvement can be formalized in our theory, and we can make use of this fact to develop programs in the paradigm of Constructive Programming. A characteristic point of our approach is that we can extract an optimization program since our theory enjoys the program extraction theorem.