. The paper investigates the strength of the antifoundation axiom on the basis of various systems of constructive set theories. 1. Introduction Intrinsically circular phenomena have come to the attention of researchers in differing fields such as mathematical logic, computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy. Logicians first explored set theories whose universe contains what are called non-wellfounded sets, or hypersets (cf. [17], [5]). But the area was considered rather exotic until these theories were put to use in developing rigorous accounts of circular notions in computer science (cf. [7]). Instead of the Foundation Axiom these set theories adopt the so-called Anti-Foundation Axiom, AFA, which gives rise to a rich universe of sets. AFA provides an elegant tool for modeling all sorts of circular phenomena. The application areas range from knowledge representation and theoretical economics to the semantics of natural language and pr...

Abstract. We introduce an operational set theory in the style of [5] and [17]. The theory we develop here is a theory of constructive sets and operations. One motivation behind constructive operational set theory is to merge a constructive notion of set ([1], [2]) with some aspects which are typical of explicit mathematics [14]. In particular, one has non-extensional operations (or rules) alongside extensional constructive sets. Operations are in general partial and a limited form of self–application is permitted. The system we introduce here is a fully explicit, finitely axiomatised system of constructive sets and operations, which is shown to be as strong as HA. 1.

This paper is concerned with metamathematical properties of intuitionistic set theories with choice principles. It is proved that the disjunction property, the numerical existence property, Church’s rule, and several other metamathematical properties hold true for Constructive Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory and full Intuitionistic Zermelo-Fraenkel augmented by any combination of the principles of Countable Choice, Dependent Choices and the Presentation Axiom. Also Markov’s principle may be added. Moreover, these properties hold effectively. For instance from a proof of a statement ∀n ∈ ω ∃m ∈ ω ϕ(n, m) one can effectively construct an index e of a recursive function such that ∀n ∈ ω ϕ(n, {e}(n)) is provable. Thus we have an explicit method of witness and program extraction from proofs involving choice principles. As for the proof technique, this paper is a continuation of [32]. [32] introduced a selfvalidating semantics for CZF that combines realizability for extensional set theory and truth.