Questions about the constructive or effective character of particular arguments arise in several areas of classical mathematics, such as in the theory of recursive functions and in numerical analysis. Some philosophers have advocated Lewis's S4 as the proper logic in which to formalize such epistemic notions. (The fundamental work on this is Hintikka [4].) Recently there have been studies of mathematical theories formalized with S4 as the underlying logic so that these epistemic notions can be expressed. (See Shapiro [7], Myhill [5], and Goodman [2]. The motivation for this work is discussed in Goodman [3].) The present paper is a contribution to the study of the simplest of these theories, namely first-order arithmetic as formalized in S4. Following Shapiro, we call this theory epistemic arithmetic (EA). More specifically, we show that EA is a conservative extension of Hey ting's arithmetic HA (ordinary first-order intuitionistic arithmetic). The question of whether EA is conservative over HA was raised but left open in Shapiro [7].

The idea of our proof is as follows. We interpret EA in an infinitary propositional S4, pretty much as Tait, for example, interprets classical arithmetic in his infinitary classical propositional calculus in [8]. We then prove a cut-elimination theorem for this infinitary propositional S4. A suitable version of the cut-elimination theorem can be formalized in HA. For cut-free infinitary proofs, there is a reflection principle provable in HA. That is, we can prove in HA that if there is a cut-free proof of the interpretation of a sentence ϕ then ϕ is true. Combining these results shows that if the interpretation of ϕ is provable in EA, then ϕ is provable in HA.