The eskolemization of universal quantifiers

Abstract

This paper is a sequel to the papers Baaz and Iemhoff (2006, 2009) [4,6] in which an alternative skolemization method called eskolemization was introduced that, when restricted to strong existential quantifiers, is sound and complete for constructive theories. In this paper we extend the method to universal quantifiers and show that for theories satisfying the witness property it is sound and complete for all formulas. We obtain a Herbrand theorem from this, and apply the method to the intuitionistic theory of equality and the intuitionistic theory of monadic predicates.