Modus ponens under hypotheses

Extract

The Stoic “indemonstrables” were inference rules; a rule about rules was the synthetic theorem: if from certain premisses a conclusion follows and from that conclusion and certain further premisses a second conclusion follows, then the second conclusion follows from all the premisses together. Similar things occur as medieval “rules of consequence”, although not usually on a metametalevel; and (with the same proviso) the following might be deemed a contemporary avatar of that Stoic theorem.

If every formula which occurs once or more often in the list A₁, A₂, …, An, B₁, B₂, …, B_m occurs also at least once in the list C₁, C₂, …, C_r then:

This rule [Church: Introduction to Mathematical Logic, 1956, pp. 94, 165], which may be called the rule of modus ponens under hypotheses (MPH), is worthy of attention for the following reasons:

A. MPH and the axioms A ⊃ A yield precisely the positive implicative calculus (and very easily, too).

B. MPH and the axioms A ⊃ f ⊃ f ⊃ A yield a new formulation of the full classical propositional calculus (in terms of f and ⊃).

C. MPH and the axioms ∼A ⊃ A ⊃ A and A ⊃. ∼A ⊃ B yield the classical calculus in terms of ∼ and ⊃.