Substructural Cut Elimination

ABSTRACT. In the paper ``Structural Cut Elimination'', Pfenning gives a proof of the admissibility of cut for intuitionistic and classical logic. The proof is remarkable in that it does not rely on difficult termination metrics, but rather a nested lexicographical induction on the structure of formulas and derivations. A crucial requirement for this proof to go through is that contraction is not an inference rule of the system. Because of this, it is necessary to change the inference rules so that contraction becomes an admissible rule rather than an inference rule. This change also requires that weakening is admissible, hence it is not directly applicable to logics in which only contraction is admissible (e.g. relevance logic).

We present a sequent calculus which admits a unified structural cut elimination proof that encompasses Intuitionistic MALL and its affine, strict and intuitionistic extensions. A nice feature of the calculus is that, for instance, moving from linear to strict logic is as simple as allowing the presence of a rule corresponding to contraction.