Abstract We encode Belnap’s basic theory of display calculi in the proof assistant Coq/Rocq version 8.18.0 and formalise the proof that Belnap’s conditions C2–C8 imply the cut-elimination theorem. Our framework allows us to formally prove meta-theoretic results such as Hilbert-completeness and derivability of explicit rules, such as cut, but also others if required. What makes our formalisation powerful is that it works entirely with an abstraction that can be instantiated to many possible logics and display calculi, although we make no attempt to precisely characterise the logics that can be properly displayed in our formalisation. For this reason, our work can be seen as a formalisation of a display calculus framework and a cut-elimination theorem for a wide range of display calculi. As examples, we apply our work to classical propositional logic (CPL), tense logic (Kt), and non-commutative non-associative Lambek calculus to obtain complete display calculi as well as formally proved cut-elimination theorems, but we believe our formalisation to be also applicable to many others. We also encoded a proof of the decidability of CPL that relies only on the structure of proofs within an additive display calculus for CPL. To our knowledge, our work is the first formalisation of a decidability result in display calculus. Moreover, all of our formal proofs are constructive as they never require the addition of the law of excluded middle in Coq’s environment (which is constructive by default), which means we were also able to extract computer programs from our proof of cut-elimination able to convert CPL/Kt/Lambek derivation trees into cut-free ones. As formal proofs are known to be significantly longer to write than usual pen-and-paper proofs, our work led to the development of a multitude of files of Coq code comprising more than 15,000 lines.
Goré et al. (Mon,) studied this question.