What's in a model? Epistemological analysis of logic programming
Marc Denecker · Lirias · 2003
It is commonly believed that the meaning of a formal declar-ative knowledge representation language is determined by its formal semantics. This is not quite so. This paper shows an epistemological ambiguity that arises in the context of logic programming. Several different logic programming for-malisms and semantics have been proposed. Hence, logic programming can be seen as an overlapping family of formal logics, each induced by a pair of a formal syntax and a for-mal semantics. We would expect that (a) each such pair has a unique declarative reading and (b) for a program in the in-tersection of several formal LP logics with the same formal semantics in each of them, its declarative reading is the same in each of them. I show in this paper that neither (a) nor (b) holds. The pa-per investigates the causes and the consequences of this phe-nomenon and points out some directions to overcome the am-biguity.