Russellian Propositional Logic and the BHK Interpretation

Abstract

The BHK interpretation interprets propositional statements as descriptions of the world of proofs; a world which is hierarchical in nature. It consists of different layers of the concept of proof; the proofs, the proofs about proofs and so on. To describe this hierarchical world, one approach is the Russellian approach in which we use a typed language to reflect this hierarchical nature in the syntax level. In this case, since the connective responsible for this hierarchical behavior is implication, we will use a typed language equipped with a hierarchy of implications, $\{\rightarrow_n\}_{n=0}^{\infty}$. In fact, using this typed propositional language, we will introduce the hierarchical counterparts of the logics $\mathbf{BPC}$, $\mathbf{EBPC}$, $\mathbf{IPC}$ and $\mathbf{FPL}$ and then by proving their corresponding soundness-completeness theorems with respect to their natural BHK interpretations, we will show how these different logics describe different worlds of proofs embodying different hierarchical behaviors.