The naturality of natural deduction (II). Some remarks on atomic polymorphism

Abstract: In a previous paper (of which this is a prosecution) we investigated the extraction of proof-theoretic properties of natural deduction derivations from their impredicative translation into System F. Our key idea was to introduce an extended equational theory for System F codifying at a syntactic level some properties found in parametric models. In a recent series of papers a different approach to extract proof-theoretic properties of natural deduction derivations was proposed by defining predicative variants of the usual translation, embedding intuitionistic propositional logic into the atomic fragment of System F. In this paper we show that this approach finds a general explanation within our equational study of second-order natural deduction, and a clear semantic justification provided by parametricity.