for relation symbols to be interpreted as being identically false. However, the interpretation of a function symbol must always assign a well-defined and total function to the symbol. Interpreting equality The equality relation is often treated specially in first order logic and other predicate logics. There are two general approaches. The first approach is to treat equality as no different than any other binary relation. In this case, if an equality symbol is included in the signature, it is usually necessary to add various axioms about equality to axiom systems (for example, the substitution axiom saying that if a = b and R(a) holds then R(b) holds as well). This approach to equality is most useful when studying signatures that do not include the equality relation, such as the signature for set theory or the signature for second-order arithmetic in which there is only an equality relation for numbers, but not an equality relation for set of numbers. The second approach is to treat the equality relation symbol as a logical constant that must be interpreted by the real equality relation in any interpretation. An interpretation that interprets equality this way is known as a normal model, so this second approach is the same as only studying interpretations that happen to be normal models. The advantage of this approach is that the axioms related to equality are automatically satisfied by every normal model, and so they do not need to be explicitly included in first-order theories when equality is treated this way. This second approach is sometimes called first order logic with equality, but many authors adopt it for the general study of first-order logic without comment. There are a few other reasons to restrict study of first-order logic to normal models. First, it is known that any first-order interpretation in which equality is interpreted by an equivalence relation and satisfies the substitution axioms for equality can be cut down to an elementarily equivalent interpretation on a subset of the original domain. Thus there is little additional generality in studying non-normal models. Second, if non-normal models are considered, then every consistent theory has an infinite model; this affects the statements of results such as the Löwenheim–Skolem theorem, which are usually stated under the assumption that only normal models are considered. Many-sorted first-order logic A generalization of first order logic considers languages with more than one sort of variables. The idea