,
Ambrus Kaposi
,
Artjoms Šinkarovs
,
Tamás Végh
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
In one of his long tales, after falling into a swamp, Baron Münchhausen salvaged himself and the horse by lifting them both up by his hair. Inspired by this, the paper presents a technique to justify very dependent types. Such types reference the term that they classify, e.g. x : F x. While in most type theories this is not allowed, we propose a technique on salvaging the meaning of both the term and the type. The proposed technique does not refer to preterms or typing relations and works in a completely algebraic setting, e.g categories with families. With a series of examples we demonstrate our technique. We use Agda to demonstrate that our examples are implementable within a proof assistant.
@InProceedings{altenkirch_et_al:LIPIcs.TYPES.2022.10,
author = {Altenkirch, Thorsten and Kaposi, Ambrus and \v{S}inkarovs, Artjoms and V\'{e}gh, Tam\'{a}s},
title = {{The M\"{u}nchhausen Method in Type Theory}},
booktitle = {28th International Conference on Types for Proofs and Programs (TYPES 2022)},
pages = {10:1--10:20},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-285-3},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2023},
volume = {269},
editor = {Kesner, Delia and P\'{e}drot, Pierre-Marie},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.TYPES.2022.10},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-184534},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.TYPES.2022.10},
annote = {Keywords: type theory, proof assistants, very dependent types}
}