Hauptsatz for higher order logic
Keyword(s):
I shall prove in this paper that Gentzen's Hauptsatz is extendible to simple type theory, i.e., to the predicate logic obtained by admitting quantification over predicates of arbitrary finite type and generalizing the second order quantification rules to cover quantifiers of other types. (That Gentzen's Hauptsatz is extendible to this logic has been known as Takeuti's conjecture; see [4].) Gentzen's Hauptsatz has been extended to second order logic in a recent paper by Tait [3]. However, as remarked by Tait, his proof seems not to be extendible to higher orders. The present proof is rather an extension of a different proof of the Hauptsatz for second order logic that I have presented in [1].