Gentzen and Jaśkowski Natural Deduction: Fundamentally Similar but Importantly Different

Gentzen’s and Jaśkowski’s formulations of natural deduction are logically equivalent in the normal sense of those words. However, Gentzen’s formulation more straightforwardly lends itself both to a normalization theorem and to a theory of “meaning” for connectives (which leads to a view of semantics called ‘inferentialism’). The present paper investigates cases where Jaskowski’s formulation seems better suited. These cases range from the phenomenology and epistemology of proof construction to the ways to incorporate novel logical connectives into the language. We close with a demonstration of this latter aspect by considering a Sheffer function for intuitionistic logic.