Completeness and other forms of Zorn’s Lemma are sometimes invoked for semantic proofs of conservation in relatively elementary mathematical contexts in which the corresponding syntactical conservation would suffice. We now show how a fairly general syntactical conservation theorem that covers plenty of the semantic approaches follows from an utmost versatile criterion for conservation given by Scott in 1974.To this end we work with multi-conclusion entailment relations as extending single-conclusion entailment relations. In a nutshell, the additional axioms with disjunctions in positive (...) position can be eliminated by reducing them to the corresponding disjunction elimination rules, which in turn prove admissible in all known mathematical instances. In deduction terms this means to fold up branchings of proof trees by way of properties of the relevant mathematical structures.Applications include the syntactical counterparts of the theorems or lemmas known under the names of Artin–Schreier, Krull–Lindenbaum, and Szpilrajn. Related work has been done before on individual instances, e.g., in locale theory, dynamical algebra, formal topology and proof analysis. (shrink)

In 1968, Orevkov presented proofs of conservativity of classical over intuitionistic and minimal predicate logic with equality for seven classes of sequents, what are known as Glivenko classes. The proofs of these results, important in the literature on the constructive content of classical theories, have remained somehow cryptic. In this paper, direct proofs for more general extensions are given for each class by exploiting the structural properties of G3 sequent calculi; for five of the seven classes the results are strengthened (...) to height-preserving statements, and it is further shown that the constructive and minimal proofs are identical in structure to the classical proof from which they are obtained. (shrink)

A constructivisation of the cut-elimination proof for sequent calculi for classical, intuitionistic and minimal infinitary logics with geometric rules—given in earlier work by the second author—is presented. This is achieved through a procedure where the non-constructive transfinite induction on the commutative sum of ordinals is replaced by two instances of Brouwer’s Bar Induction. The proof of admissibility of the structural rules is made ordinal-free by introducing a new well-founded relation based on a notion of embeddability of derivations. Additionally, conservativity for (...) classical over intuitionistic/minimal logic for the seven (finitary) Glivenko sequent classes is here shown to hold also for the corresponding infinitary classes. (shrink)