Abstract

It is often said that in a purely formal perspective, intuitionistic logic has no obvious advantage to deal with the liar-type paradoxes. In this paper, we will argue that the standard intuitionistic natural deduction systems are vulnerable to the liar-type paradoxes in the sense that the acceptance of the liar-type sentences results in inference to absurdity (⊥). The result shows that the restriction of the Double Negation Elimination (DNE) fails to block the inference to ⊥. It is, however, not the problem of the intuitionistic approaches to the liar-type paradoxes but the lack of expressive power of the standard intuitionistic natural deduction system. We introduce a meta-level negation for a given system and a meta-level absurdity, ⋏, to the intuitionistic system. We shall show that in the system, the inference to ⊥ is not given without the assumption that the system is complete. Moreover, we consider the Double Meta-Level Negation Elimination rules (DMNE) which implicitly assume the completeness of the system. Then, the restriction of DMNE can rule out the inference to ⊥.