The true concurrency of Herbrand’s theorem

Herbrand’s theorem, widely regarded as a cornerstone of proof theory, exposes some of the constructive content of classical logic. In its simplest form, it reduces the validity of a first-order purely existential formula to that of a finite disjunction. More generally, it gives a reduction of first-order validity to propositional validity, by understanding the structure of the assignment of first-order terms to existential quantifiers, and the causal dependency between quantifiers. In this paper, we show that Herbrand’s theorem in its general form can be elegantly stated as a theorem in the framework of concurrent games. The causal structure of concurrent strategies, paired with annotations by first-order terms, is used to specify the dependency between quantifiers. Furthermore concurrent strategies can be composed, yielding a compositional proof of Herbrand’s theorem, simply by interpreting classical sequent proofs in a well-chosen denotational model.