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Backstory: I had problems of accepting Mendelson's rule of Generalization (it's $(A(x) \vdash \forall x, A(x)$).

Surfing around the net, I found this post which explained the situation for me: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2004-September/008483.html (there are two different consequence relations; the other one gives GEN rule that I like much more: if $\vdash A(x)$ then $\vdash \forall x, A(x)$).

My reasons to believe that "truth relation consequence" is better:

  1. It's used when writing standard proofs (at school, highschool and also in all proof assistants for formal proofs that I know - Coq, Lean and probably much more). There's no reason to teach something that wouldn't be used practically later. (At least for intro courses of Mathematical Logic, as I believe.)

  2. It has beautiful correspondence between consequence relation and usual implication connective.

  3. No more weirdness of Deduction theorem for proofs that has used GEN inference rule (this is probably subjective and related to 2nd point).

  4. Truth consequence relation is much more related to usual type theory, I believe. I don't know what's the status of Mendelson's consequence relation in this aspect, but there must be a reason why it seems not used in normal mathematical work. (I may be wrong.)

I believe that truth consequence relation should be teached as primary. The other kind can be interpreted by adding all missing universal quantifiers to formulas and treating it as "theorem inference rule" (?) that gives one more theorem from given theorems.

So there's the question:

What's the consensus in academia on the pedagogical and practical usefulness of Mendelson's (et al.) variation of FOL? Is it true that "truth consequence rule" is more natural?

zaa
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