Reasoning Inside The Box: Deduction in Herbrand Logics

Herbrand structures are a subclass of standard first-order structures commonly used in logic and automated reasoning due to their strong definitional character. This paper is devoted to the logics induced by them: Herbrand and semi-Herbrand logics, with and without equality. The rich expressiveness of these logics entails that there is no adequate effective proof system for them. We therefore introduce infinitary proof systems for Herbrand logics, and prove their completeness. Natural and sound finitary approximations of the infinitary systems are also presented.