The investigations on higher-order type theories and on the related notion of parametric polymorphism constitute the technical counterpart of the old foundational problem of the circularity (or impredicativity) of second and higher-order logic. However, the epistemological significance of such investigations has not received much attention in the contemporary foundational debate.

We discuss Girard’s normalization proof for second order type theory or System F and compare it with two faulty consistency arguments: the one given by Frege for the logical system of the Grundgesetze (shown inconsistent by Russell’s paradox) and the one given by Martin-Löf for the intuitionistic type theory with a type of all types (shown inconsistent by Girard’s paradox).

The comparison suggests that the question of the circularity of second order logic cannot be reduced to Russell’s and Poincaré’s 1906 “vicious circle” diagnosis. Rather, it reveals a bunch of mathematical and logical ideas hidden behind the hazardous idea of impredicative quantification, constituting a vast (and largely unexplored) domain for foundational research.

We introduce a new hierarchy of computably enumerable degrees. This hierarchy is based on computable ordinal notations measuring complexity of approximation of ${\rm{\Delta }}_2^0$ functions. The hierarchy unifies and classifies the combinatorics of a number of diverse constructions in computability theory. It does so along the lines of the high degrees (Martin) and the array noncomputable degrees (Downey, Jockusch, and Stob). The hierarchy also gives a number of natural definability results in the c.e. degrees, including a definable antichain.

In this article we examine the natural interpretation of a ramified type hierarchy into Martin-Löf type theory with an infinite sequence of universes. It is shown that under this predicative interpretation some useful special cases of Russell’s reducibility axiom are valid, namely functional reducibility. This is sufficient to make the type hierarchy usable for development of constructive mathematical analysis in the style of Bishop. We present a ramified type theory suitable for this purpose. One may regard the results of this article as an alternative solution to the problem of the proliferation of levels of real numbers in Russell’s theory, which avoids impredicativity, but instead imposes constructive logic. The intuitionistic ramified type theory introduced here also suggests that there is a natural associated notion of predicative elementary topos.