Coherence for logicians

Abstract

This paper is addressed to logicians not familiar with category theory. It gives a new proof of coherence for symmetric monoidal closed categories, proven by Kelly and Mac Lane in early 1970s. We find this result of great importance for proof theory and it is formulated here in pure logical terminology free of categorial notions. Coherence is related to the generality conjecture in general proof theory and we hope that our formulation will make it closer to the proof-theoretical community.