There are two main lacunae in recent work on modal logic: a lack of general results and a lack of negative results. This or that logic is shown to have such and such a desirable property, but very little is known about the scope or bounds of the property. Thus there are numerous particular results on completeness, decidability, finite model property, compactness, etc., but very few general or negative results.

In these papers I hope to help fill these lacunae. This first part contains a very general completeness result. Let In be the axiom that says there are at most n incomparable points related to a given point. Then the result is that any logic containing K4 and In is complete.

The first three sections provide background material for the rest of the papers. The fourth section shows that certain models contain no infinite ascending chains, and the fifth section shows how certain elements can be dropped from the canonical model. The sixth section brings the previous results together to establish completeness, and the seventh and last section establishes compactness, though of a weak kind. All of the results apply to the corresponding intermediate logics.