"What Proofs are For"
Abstract: In this short talk, I present a new account of the nature of proof, with the aim of explaining how proof could actually play the role in reasoning that it does, and answering some long-standing puzzles about the nature of proof. Along the way, I’ll explain how Kreisel’s Squeezing argument helps us understand the connection between an informal notion of of validity and the notions formalised in our accounts of proofs and models, and the relationship between proof-theoretic and model-theoretic analyses of logical consequence.