Confluent and Natural Cut Elimination in Classical Logic (original) (raw)

We show that, in deep inference, there is a natural and confluent cut elimination procedure that has a strikingly simple semantic justification. We proceed in two phases: we first tackle the propositional case with a construction that we call the 'experiments method'. Here we build a proof made of as many derivations as there are models of the given tautology. Then we lift the experiment method to the predicate calculus, by tracing all the existential witnesses, and in so doing we reconstruct the Herbrand theorem. The confluence of the procedure is essentially taken care of by the commutativity and associativity of disjunction.