Abstract

We provide a fine‐grained analysis on the relation between König's lemma, weak König's lemma, and the decidable fan theorem in the context of constructive reverse mathematics. In particular, we show that double negated variants of König's lemma and weak König's lemma are equivalent to double negated variants of the general decidable fan theorem and the binary decidable fan theorem, respectively, over a nearly intuitionistic system containing a weak countable choice only. This implies that the general decidable fan theorem is not equivalent to the binary decidable fan theorem in the absence of a strong countable choice. In addition, we introduce a principle which fills the gap between König's lemma and weak König's lemma, and show that König's lemma is equivalent to weak König's lemma plus this principle. We also solve several problems arising from the investigation.