A formal theorem in Church's theory of types

Abstract

This note is concerned with the logical formalism with types recently introduced by Church [1] (and called (C) in this note) It was shewn in his paper (Theorem 26α) that if Yα stands for(a form of the “axiom of infinity” for the type α), Yα can be proved formally, from Yι and the axioms 1 to 7, for all types α of the forms ι′, ι″, …. For other types the question was left open, but for the purposes of an intrinsic characterisation of the Church type-stratification given by one of us, it is desirable to have the remaining cases cleared up. A formal proof of Yα is now given for all types α containing ι, but the proof uses, in addition to Axioms 1 to 7 and Yι, also Axiom 9 (in connection with Def. 4), and Axiom 10 (in Theorem 9).