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First Order Theories of Individual Concepts and Propositions

This paper was first published in Machine Intelligence 9 in 1979.

This paper was first published in Machine Intelligence 9 in 1979. In present work, I have changed notation. I now write Knows(Pat,TTelephone,MMike) instead of true(Knows(pat,Telepone(Mike)) or knows(pat,Telephone(Mike)). The new notation is for compatibility with my and other peoples work in logical AI. I use caps for constants and double the initial letter to denote concepts.

We discuss first order theories in which individual concepts are admitted as mathematical objects along with the things that reify them. This allows very straightforward formalizations of knowledge, belief, wanting, and necessity in ordinary first order logic without modal operators. Applications are given in philosophy and in artificial intelligence. We do not treat general concepts, and we do not present any full axiomatizations but rather show how various facts can be expressed.

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