Lecture 21: Soundness and

Completeness

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Lecture 21: Soundness and
Completeness

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Goal Today

✤ Our goal today is to state and define the soundness and completeness
theorems.

✤ Then we will extract some rules of thumb for how to effectively use
these results together to solve problems.

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Initial Contrast: Provability vs.
Validity
✤ So over the past couple of weeks,
we’ve learned about two different
notions:
✤
provability: ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn ⊢ ψ
✤ validity: ϕ1, ϕ2,…, ϕn ⊨ ψ
✤ Again, the idea is: provability
relation holds when there is a proof
of the conclusion ψ from premises
ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn.
✤ The validity relation holds when a
truth table containing them all
satisfies this property: on any row
where all the premises ϕ1, ϕ2,…, ϕn
are true, the conclusion ψ is also
true.
✤ There’s an analogous notion for
predicate logic, but today we’ll
stick to propositional logic.
✤ It’s natural at this juncture to ask
how these two relate to one
another. Before we state the general
result, let’s look at some examples.

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First Example
✤ Show: p, p➝q ⊢q ✤ Show: p, p➝q ⊨q

✤ Proof: ✤ Proof:

✤ 1. p (assumption) 1 2 3 4 5
✤ 2. p➝q (assumption) p q p p➝q q
1 T T T T T
✤ 3. q (E➝ 1,2)
2 T F T F F
3 F T F T T
4 F F F T F

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Second Example
✤ Show: p, q ⊢ p∧q ✤ Show: p, q ⊨ p∧q

✤ Proof: ✤ Proof:

✤ 1. p (assumption) 1 2 3
✤ 2. q (assumption) p q p∧q
1 T T T
✤ 3. p∧q (I∧1,2)
2 T F F
3 F T F
4 F F F

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Third Example
✤ Show: p,¬p ⊢ q ✤ Show: p,¬p ⊨ q

✤ Proof: ✤ Proof:

✤ 1. p (assumption) 1 2 3 3 4
✤ 2. ¬p (assumption) p q p ¬p q
1 T T T F T
✤ 3. ⊥ (E¬ 1,2)
2 T F T F F
✤ 4. q (EFSQ 3)
3 F T F T T
4 F F F T F

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The Major Result

✤ These examples should hopefully make the following general result

very plausible:

✤ ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn ⊢ψ if and only if ϕ1, ϕ2,…, ϕn ⊨ ψ

✤ So given premises ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn and conclusion ψ, there is a proof

from assumptions ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn to conclusion ψ if and only if the
argument with premises ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn and this conclusion ψ is valid.

✤ Obviously the two notions ⊢ and ⊨ are very different: the first
concerns proofs, and the second concerns what happens on every row
of a truth table. But the major result says that these two things line up.

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Two Parts of the Major Result

✤ The two parts of the major result are sometimes given special names:

✤ Soundness Theorem: if ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn ⊢ψ then ϕ1, ϕ2,…, ϕn ⊨ ψ

✤ Completeness Theorem: if ϕ1, ϕ2,…, ϕn ⊨ ψ then ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn ⊢ψ

✤ They are given these names because the proofs are very different, and
in general the proof of the completeness theorem is much harder.

✤ You can kind of see why: to prove soundness, you must simply check
that our rules for our proof system preserve truth. To prove
completeness you must show that all valid arguments have proofs.
Initially it’s not obvious how you would show this.

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Philosophical Significance 1/3

✤ After we covered the introduction and elimination rules for the

propositional connectives, we kept on adding rules to our deductive
system like EFSQ and ￢￢ Introduction.

✤ Is there something non-arbitrary about this specific list of rules? It

seems that the soundness and completeness proofs give us a reason to
think so.

✤ Kleene: “[...] we have listed eleven postulates for the propositional

calculus [...]. Can we give a reason why we stop with just these?
Might we with advantage attempt to discover others which could be
added to the list to give more provable formulas?'' (Introduction to
Metamathematics p. 131).

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Philosophical Significance 2/3

✤ A. Seems plausible that: if ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn ⊢ψ, then the truth of the
premises ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn guarantees the truth of the conclusion ψ.

✤ B. Further, seems plausible that: if the truth of the premises ϕ1, ϕ2, . . .,
ϕn guarantees the truth of the conclusion ψ, then whenever the
premises ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn are true, the conclusion ψ is true.

✤ C. Moreover, seems plausible that: if whenever the premises ϕ1,

ϕ2, . . ., ϕn are true, the conclusion ψ is true, then ϕ1, ϕ2,…, ϕn ⊨ ψ.

✤ D. Finally, completeness theorem tells us: if ϕ1, ϕ2,…, ϕn ⊨ ψ

then ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn ⊢ψ.

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Philosophical Significance 3/3

✤ So the following are equivalent:

✤ 1. ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn ⊢ψ

✤ 2. the truth of premises ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn guarantees the truth of the conclusion ψ.

✤ 3. whenever premises ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn are true, the conclusion ψ is true.

✤ 4. ϕ1, ϕ2,…, ϕn ⊨ ψ

✤ This is significant because we suspected but did not know this

equivalence beforehand. This argument is called the Kreisel squeezing
argument (from his “Informal Rigour and Completeness Proofs”).

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Applications of the Major Result
✤ Suppose that someone asked ✤ Show: p, p➝q,q➝r, r➝s, s➝t ⊢t
you to show the following:
✤ 1. p (assumption)
✤ p, p➝q,q➝r, r➝s, s➝t ⊨t ✤ 2. p➝q (assumption)
✤ 3. q➝r (assumption)
✤ This would be a really really big ✤ 4. r➝s (assumption)
truth table! It would have 25=32 ✤ 5. s➝t (assumption)
different rows! ✤ 6. q (E➝ 1,2)
✤ 7. r (E➝ 2,6)
✤ However, once we know our ✤ 8. s (E➝ 4,7)
major result, we know it ✤ 9. t (E➝5, 8)
suffices to show that there’s a
deduction.

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From Lec 17, Handout 2:
Example 8 (Pierce’s Law)
✤ Show: ⊢ ((p➝q)➝p)➝p ✤ What’s the strategy here? Well,
✤ 1. (p➝q)➝p (assumption) we want to go from ((p➝q)➝p)
✤ 2. ¬p (assumption) to p inside a box.
✤ 3. p (assumption) ✤ How in the world are we going
✤ 4. ⊥ (E¬ 2,3)
to get p? The assumption that
✤ 5. q (EFSQ 4)
((p➝q)➝p) doesn’t give us a lot
✤ 6. p➝q (I➝ 3-5) to work with. So we try to first
✤ 7. p (E➝ 1,6) to obtain ¬¬p.
✤ 8. ⊥ (E¬ 2,7)
✤ 9. ¬¬p (I¬ 2-8)
✤ So we try to go from ¬p to ⊥
✤ 10. p (¬¬ 9) inside a box. We do this by
✤ 11. ((p➝q)➝p)➝p (I➝ 1-10)
trying to obtain p as well.

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Applications of the Major Result

✤ We just did Pierce’s law: ⊢ ((p➝q)➝p)➝p. Conceptually, this proof

was complicated, even though it has only two letters. By the major
result, we could have instead done the following truth-table.

p q p➝q p (p➝q)➝p p ((p➝q)➝p)➝p

T T T T T T T
T F F T T T T
F T T F F F T
F F T F F F T

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Two Rules of Thumb
✤ So I suppose that these two
applications suggest some
general “rules of thumb” for
deciding when to try to show
provability vs. validity:
✤ provability: ϕ1, ϕ2, . . ., ϕn ⊢ ψ
✤ validity: ϕ1, ϕ2,…, ϕn ⊨ ψ
✤ If you argument has more than
three letters, you might want to
give a proof.
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✤ If your argument seems like it
has a lot of negations in it, or
seems like it might require
EFSQ or ¬¬-Rule to prove, you
might want to try to show that
it’s valid with e.g. a truth-table.
✤ There’s might well be situations
in which neither of these rules
would apply: imagine for
instance something like Pierce’s
law but which had 5
propositional letters in it!
Ω

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