=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2710/invited3
|storemode=property
|title=On the informal semantics of knowledge representation languages and the case of Logic Programming (invited talk)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2710/abstract-invited-3.pdf
|volume=Vol-2710
|authors=Marc Denecker
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/cilc/Denecker20
}}
==On the informal semantics of knowledge representation languages and the case of Logic Programming (invited talk)==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2710/abstract-invited-3.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
       On the informal semantics of
    knowledge representation languages
    and the case of Logic Programming

                             Marc Denecker

           Department of Computing, Celestijnenlaan 200 A,
                     B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium
                  marc.denecker@cs.kuleuven.be



Abstract. The informal semantics of a formal language aims to ex-
press the knowledge conveyed by formulas and theories of the language
about the application domain, in a precise and systematic way. View-
ing a (declarative) formal language as a tool to encode computational
problems, the question of its informal semantics may not even be a sci-
entific question. In this talk, we will view a formal KR language as a
formal scientific model of certain types of knowledge. The question of
its informal semantics then becomes the corner stone of such a scientific
model, as it relates the formal entities (the formulas) to the informal
objects that they intend to represent (the knowledge). The hope with
this approach is to base discussions on this topic on more solid scientific
ground. The lecture starts with a discussion on the feasabiliy of viewing
a formal language as a formal scientific model of knowledge, and exper-
imental methods to verify proposed informal semantics. These methods
are applied to clarify the informal semantics of Logic Programming. Two
main ideas for informal semantics of LP were proposed: logic programs
as definitions, and the (auto)epistemic/default interpretation. We then
analyze when these informal semantics apply, when they agree and dis-
agree, what is the meaning of negation and the rule operator and which
informal semantics applies in the context of concrete examples.

</pre>