In my paper [10] I introduced the syntactical concepts “positive part” and “negative part” of logical formulas in first-order predicate calculus. These concepts make it possible to establish logical systems on inference rules similar to Gentzen's inference rules but without using the concept “sequent” and without needing Gentzen's structural inference rules. Proof-theoretical investigations of several formal systems based on positive and negative parts are published in [11]. In this paper I consider a similar formal system of simple type theory.

A syntactical concept of “strict derivability” results from the formal system in [10] by generalization of the axioms and inference rules from first to higher-order predicate calculus and by addition of inference rules for set abstraction by means of a λ-symbol which allows us to form set expressions of arbitrary types from well-formed formulas.

McKinsey and Tarski [3] described Gödel's proof that the number of Brouwerian-algebraic functions is infinite. They gave an example of a sequence of infinitely many distinct Brouwerian-algebraic functions of one argument, which means that there are infinitely many non-equivalent formulas of one variable in the intuitionistic propositional calculus LJ of Gentzen [1]. However they did not completely characterize such formulas. In § 1 of this note, we define a sequence of basic formulas P∞(X), P0(X), P1(X), … and prove the following theorems.