our own society recognizes corporate organizations as owners
(Harbrecht & Berle, 1959), and other societies recognize
such agents as animals and spirits as owners (Obi, 1963).
Also, the domains of P, E, and U are not necessarily
mutually exclusive. Most owners are users, though not
always, and it is possible to own people as slaves.
Ownership as a concept must somehow entail relationships
between these sets P, E, F, and U.
In general, concepts can be considered as functions
that relate the variables that they take as arguments
(Frege, 1891/1952, 1892/1952; Miller, 1978). For example,
the concept of 'eating' in the sentence, "John eats candy,"
might be expressed as,
Eat (John, candy),
where "eat" is the function giving the rule for the
relationship between the two arguments "John" and "candy".
Thus, the concept, "own" might be considered as a function
that takes four arguments. For example,
own ( Pi, Ej, Fm, Uo )
would mean that owner Pi decides which uses Fm of events Ej
users Uo may have. By this framework, ownership essentially
allows the owners to regulate the pairing of users with uses
of objects. Typically, the owner would himself be among the
users. To give a more concrete example concerning ownership
among children: