In the early days of the development of Kripke-style semantics for modal logic a great deal of effort was devoted to showing that particular axiom systems were characterised by a class of models describable by a first-order condition on a binary relation. For a time the approach seemed all encompassing, but recent work by Thomason [6] and Fine [2] has shown it to be somewhat limited—there are logics not determined by any class of Kripke models at all. In fact it now seems that modal logic is basically second-order in nature, in that any system may be analysed in terms of structures having a nominated class of second-order individuals (subsets) that serve as interpretations of propositional variables (cf. [7]). The question has thus arisen as to how much of modal logic can be handled in a first-order way, and precisely which modal sentences are determined by first-order conditions on their models. In this paper we present a model-theoretic characterisation of this class of sentences, and show that it does not include the much discussed LMp → MLp.

Definition 1. A modal frame ℱ = 〈W, R〉 consists of a set W on which a binary relation R is defined. A valuation V on ℱ is a function that associates with each propositional variable p a subset V(p) of W (the set of points at which p is “true”).