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>Let's imagine I had shown that something was either one or two. You seem to be claiming I could not take positive proofs assuming each of them and turn it into a full proof.

When you break it down to the logical axioms, you can't use cases like that. Try it yourself. You get something like this:

Let A: (k > 0)

B: (k = 0)

k is a whole number, therefore A v B.

A -> X !=2

B -> X !=2

Okay, from here, you need to deduce X != 2. Traditionally we do this by applying proof by cases, but as I showed in my other comment, this requires the law of the excluded middle.

I don't see any other propositional logic axioms we can apply to achieve the same result.



>Traditionally we do this by applying proof by cases, but as I showed in my other comment, this requires the law of the excluded middle.

I think that's because you don't know A v B. But in my case you can directly prove A v B.

The form is (A v B, A -> C, B -> C) -> C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_exhaustion says that this is called a direct proof.




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