System
Difficulty: hard — 6 definitions, 0 abbreviations, 1 lemmas, 0 theorems, 0 examples.
Proof systems in the abstract: what a deduction is, rather than only whether one exists.
Popper’s basis says that a conclusion is deducible from a list of premises. It does not say what the deduction looks like. A proof system supplies that witness. Fixing a collection of rules determines which trees count as deductions, and the deducibility relation is then read off: a conclusion follows from some premises exactly when a tree of that kind exists.
A rule says what has to be established for it to apply, and what it then concludes. Each of these is a claim in its own right, carrying the premises available for it. Writing a rule this way lets it close assumptions off, and also lets it restrict which assumptions may be present at all, as the rules of modal logic do.
Nothing about a basis comes for free at this generality. A rule application fixes exactly the premises it draws on, so enlarging them, or chaining deductions together, has to be earned. The next module carves out the rules for which it is.
Sources: Hiep, New Foundations for Separation Logic (PhD thesis, 2024), appendix A.3; Grabmayer, Relating Proof Systems for Recursive Types (PhD thesis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2005), section 4.2.2, for the distinction between rules that can be checked from a single node and rules that inspect the assumptions standing above it.
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