ABSTRACT
The notion of a command requirement is introduced to serve as systematic counterpart to the informal idea of ‘what accomplishments a command requires’, considered apart from such things as who it is that gives the command, to whom it is given, under what conditions it becomes operative, and the like. The symbolism captures the two command paradigms: (conditional) when-next commands and (conditional) standing orders. When a command actually has no execution precondition, being a peremptory or categorical command, one shall treat it as a conditional command with a vacuous (empty, trivial) condition. It thus appears that in order to deal adequately with the sorts of commands at which the theory is directed, it is necessary to use machinery, which is designed explicitly to accommodate temporal considerations. A straightforwardly propositional command operator — be it absolute or even conditional—fails to provide a sufficiently powerful basis for an adequate logical theory of commands.
