On the Representation of Normative Sentences in FOL

Rules, regulations and policy statements quite frequently contain nested sequences of normative modalities as in, for example: The database manager is obliged to permit the deputy-manager to authorise access for senior departmental staff. Parking on highways ought to be forbidden. Accordingly, a knowledge-representation language for such sentences must be able to accommodate nesting of this kind. However, if--as some have proposed--normative modalities such as obligatory, permitted, and authorised are to be interpreted as first-order predicates of named actions, then nesting appears to present a problem, since the scope formula of obligatory in "obligatory that it is permitted that a " (where a names an action) is not a name but a sentence. The ‘disquotation' theory presented in Kimbrough ("A Note on Interpretations for Federated Languages and the Use of Disquotation", and elsewhere) may provide a candidate solution to this FOL problem. In this paper we rehearse parts of that theory and evaluate its efficacy for dealing with the indicated normative nesting problem.