Abstract

When proving a theorem, one makes intermediate claims, leaving parts temporarily unspecified. These `open' parts may be proofs but also terms. In interactive theorem proving systems, one prominently deals with these `unfinished proofs' and `open terms'. We study these `open phenomena' from the point of view of logic. This amounts to finding a correctness criterion for `unfinished proofs' (where some parts may be left open, but the logical steps that have been made are still correct). Furthermore we want to capture the notion of `proof state'. Proof states are the objects that interactive theorem provers operate on and we want to understand them in terms of logic. In this paper we define `open higher order predicate logic', an extension of higher order logic with unfinished (open) proofs and open terms. Then we define a type theoretic variant of this open higher order logic together with a formulas-as-types embedding from open higher order logic to this type theory. We show how this type theory nicely captures the notion of `proof state', which is now a type-theoretic context.

Citations