This dissertation consists of three chapters:Chapter 1 Is a logicist bound to the claim that as a matter of analytic truth there is an
actual infinity of objects? If Hume’s Principle is analytic then in the standard setting the
answer appears to be yes. Hodes’s work pointed to a way out by offering a modal picture
in which only a potential infinity was posited. However, this project was abandoned due
to apparent failures of cross-world predication. We re-explore this idea and discover that
in the setting of the potential infinite one can interpret first-order Peano arithmetic, but
not second-order Peano arithmetic. We conclude that in order for the logicist to weaken
the metaphysically loaded claim of necessary actual infinities, they must also weaken the
mathematics they recover.
Chapter 2 There have been several recent results bringing into focus the super-intuitionistic
nature of most notions of proof-theoretic validity. But there has been very little work evaluating
the consequences of these results. In this chapter, we explore the question of whether
these results undermine the claim that proof-theoretic validity shows us which inferences
follow from the meaning of the connectives when defined by their introduction rules. It is
argued that the super-intuitionistic inferences are valid due to the correspondence between
the treatment of the atomic formulas and more complex formulas.
Chapter 3 Prawitz (1971) conjectured that proof-theoretic validity offers a semantics for
intuitionistic logic. This conjecture has recently been proven false by Piecha and Schroeder-
Heister (2019). This article resolves one of the questions left open by this recent result by
showing the extensional alignment of proof-theoretic validity and general inquisitive logic.
General inquisitive logic is a generalisation of inquisitive semantics, a uniform semantics for
questions and assertions. The chapter further defines a notion of quasi-proof-theoretic validity
by restricting proof-theoretic validity to allow double negation elimination for atomic
formulas and proves the extensional alignment of quasi-proof-theoretic validity and inquisitive
logic.