Alongside the analogy between maximal ideals and complete theories, the Jacobson radical carries over from ideals of commutative rings to theories of propositional calculi. This prompts a variant of Lindenbaum’s Lemma that relates classical validity and intuitionistic provability, and the syntactical counterpart of which is Glivenko’s Theorem. The Jacobson radical in fact turns out to coincide with the classical deductive closure. As a by-product we obtain a possible interpretation in logic of the axioms-as-rules conservation criterion for a multi-conclusion Scott-style entailment relation over a single-conclusion one.

Glivenko’s theorem states that an arbitrary propositional formula is classically provable if and only if its double negation is intuitionistically provable. The result does not extend to full first-order predicate logic, but does extend to first-order predicate logic without the universal quantifier. A recent paper by Zdanowski shows that Glivenko’s theorem also holds for second-order propositional logic without the universal quantifier. We prove that Glivenko’s theorem extends to some versions of simple type theory without the universal quantifier. Moreover, we prove that Kuroda’s negative translation, which is known to embed classical first-order logic into intuitionistic first-order logic, extends to the same versions of simple type theory. We also prove that the Glivenko property fails for simple type theory once a weak form of functional extensionality is included.