Abstract

A metalogical framework is a logic with an associated methodology that is used to represent other logics and to reason about their metalogical properties. We propose that logical frameworks can be good metalogical frameworks when their logics support reective reasoning and their theories always have initial models. We present a concrete realization of this idea in rewriting logic. Theories in rewriting logic always have initial models and this logic supports reective reasoning. This implies that inductive reasoning is valid when proving properties about the initial models of theories in rewriting logic, and that we can use reection to reason at the metalevel about these properties. In fact, we can uniformly reect induction principles for proving metatheorems about rewriting logic theories and their parameterized extensions. We show that this reective methodology provides an eective framework for dierent, non-trivial, kinds of formal metatheoretic reasoning; one can...

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